Above the Rain (Ken Jacobs, 2019) (Patreon)

This might be a film emergency. You need to watch this, like, now.

Ken Jacobs has been working for years now on his current "Eternalism" method, which is a digital mutation of his Nervous System film-performance works. Those works, which used identical strips of film and a propeller to show out-of-phase, frame-by-frame motion and generate 3D effects, has now been adapted with the help of a computer program Jacobs co-wrote with his daughter Nisi. He has produced scores of small pieces using this method, including a growing catalog of GIFs. In a way, Jacobs has downsized his practice into something closer to photography.

But he has applied the method to longer works, and one of them is his latest, Above the Rain. It is a breathtaking sculptural study of cloud formations. In many respects this is an elaboration of certain formal ideas that Jacobs explored in his 2011 film Seeking the Monkey King, which organized its visual field around crumpled metal and jagged textures. Here, we see the obverse -- full, lush, rounded objects that lunge out at us seductively, like a pillowy landing in another dimension.

In the 1930s, Alfred Stieglitz changed photography by shooting clouds. He called the series Equivalents, because as pure abstractions, they had given up their identity as photographic objects and entered the realm of aesthetic forms. Unlike "straight photography," the Equivalents were photographs that did not derive their meaning from their denotative content. And yet, they were the logical conclusion of "straight photography," taken right from the sky, presented as the result of a method of seeing.

Jacobs has long been a keen student of the modernist legacy, and one of his major contributions has been the introduction of time to still aesthetic gestures, such as painting, sculpture, or photography. But with the Eternalist method, Jacobs is not moving us into futurity, and certainly not into narrative time. Rather, he lets us hover in a toggling instant, a Bergsonian present, and just vibrate, watching the visual world shake like a fission reaction. "Eternity," then, is always a set of fluctuating presents, and only after the fact can we yoke them together, critically, and get somewhere new.

Above the Rain can be viewed here.