From Surface to Time, and Back. An example of Medium Translation as a tool to expand perception and the viewer's experience.

MAK - Mind Art Knowledge conference and exhibition, LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, Brussels,
https://www.mindartknowledge.org/

Talk given on wednesday June 17th, 2026, at CINEMATEK The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Brussels.

Jean-Baptiste Maitre

From surface to time, and back: an example of medium translation as a tool to expand perception and the viewer's experience.

ABSTRACT - This presentation will discuss two related artworks that explore the transformation of image with time. In "Cut Through the Living Room of The Exterminating Angel", a continuous camera movement from Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film “El Ángel Exterminador” is reconstructed by extracting every frame from the sequence and assembling them into a single panoramic image. The result compresses cinematic duration into a flat photographic surface, turning movement into an object of visual reading.

The second work, Shaped Cinema, performs an opposite operation. Taking Frank Stella’s shaped canvases as its point of departure, the video translates a static painted form into a time-based structure (a video). Rather than presenting painting as an object anchored in space, the work activates its shape through cinematic motion, rhythm, and temporal unfolding.

Together, these works form a reciprocal investigation into the threshold between surface (painting, photographs) and cinema. One spatializes time; the other temporalizes space. One transforms a moving sequence into a surface; the other transforms a surface into an event. In both cases, the work is not simply representational but procedural: it asks how media can be reconfigured through acts of translation.

The presentation will introduce how these artworks produce a form of artistic research into perception itself. They show that viewers do not only see images, but actively organize them into continuity, shape, and meaning. In that sense, the works draw on Rudolf Arnheim’s idea that the structures of images prevail over its details as they show perception as an active process of organizing fragments into coherent form and temporal continuity. The presentation also extends into Rosalind Krauss’s post-medium condition applied to moving image and photographic reconstruction as a form of medium invention.

By placing Buñuel and Stella in dialogue, the presentation examines how cinema and pictorial surface (painting, photographs) can be rethought as reversible operations, each revealing something essential about the other.

Photography credit: Students of Narafi at Luca school of arts, BArt (beire) Servaes - Liliana alexandra Simões de Sá - Guust de troyer - Thao-Ly Vu

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Jean-Baptiste Maitre

From surface to time, and back: an example of medium translation as a tool to expand perception and the viewer's experience.

ABSTRACT - This presentation will discuss two related artworks that explore the transformation of image with time. In "Cut Through the Living Room of The Exterminating Angel", a continuous camera movement from Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film “El Ángel Exterminador” is reconstructed by extracting every frame from the sequence and assembling them into a single panoramic image. The result compresses cinematic duration into a flat photographic surface, turning movement into an object of visual reading.

The second work, Shaped Cinema, performs an opposite operation. Taking Frank Stella’s shaped canvases as its point of departure, the video translates a static painted form into a time-based structure (a video). Rather than presenting painting as an object anchored in space, the work activates its shape through cinematic motion, rhythm, and temporal unfolding.

Together, these works form a reciprocal investigation into the threshold between surface (painting, photographs) and cinema. One spatializes time; the other temporalizes space. One transforms a moving sequence into a surface; the other transforms a surface into an event. In both cases, the work is not simply representational but procedural: it asks how media can be reconfigured through acts of translation.

The presentation will introduce how these artworks produce a form of artistic research into perception itself. They show that viewers do not only see images, but actively organize them into continuity, shape, and meaning. In that sense, the works draw on Rudolf Arnheim’s idea that the structures of images prevail over its details as they show perception as an active process of organizing fragments into coherent form and temporal continuity. The presentation also extends into Rosalind Krauss’s post-medium condition applied to moving image and photographic reconstruction as a form of medium invention.

By placing Buñuel and Stella in dialogue, the presentation examines how cinema and pictorial surface (painting, photographs) can be rethought as reversible operations, each revealing something essential about the other.