Ken Jacobs describes Bob Fleischner Dying: "Bob allows his sick and fading image to be caught in stereo photography. A man of mystery, so banal in some ways, so unexpectedly 'on' when the situation demanded. The cameraman for Blonde Cobra and much beloved by the next generation of NY film-makers."
Jacobs documents a New York street vendor, taking a short interaction between the vendor and a customer and protracting it into a strobing, throbbing, pulsing meditation on movement and light.
A train passes though a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space are toyed with, things enter an impossible state of ongoing movement while going nowhere. The actual tunnel experience sets off a metaphysical one. Composed to the first part of DRUMMING by Steve Reich.
In Capitalism: Slavery, Jacobs uses a Victorian stereograph (a double-photograph) of slaves picking cotton under the watchful eye of a white overseer as the source for this wrenching silent work. Through digital manipulation, Jacobs creates a haunting illusion of depth and movement. It is as if he...
The Nervous Magic Lantern is a projection device I came up with in the year 2000. With assistance from wife Flo (Florence) we have been performing with it ever since. It pushed aside The Nervous System first presented publicly in 1975. The Nervous System required two prints of a film shown...
An homage to Op-Art, Brain Operations was inspired by an optical illusion produced by checkered tiles on the artist's bathroom floor. "When editing 16mm film, I had reached for a strand and closed my hand on nothing," Jacobs explains. "I had visually coupled similar-appearing frames, popping them...
First created and presented as a Tzadik New Jewish Culture offering in 1993. First performed live as a Nervous System performance with Catherine Jauniaux performing onstage, this version has been reconstructed from scratch (film-frame by film-frame) on the computer. This current embodiment does not...
