Cory Arcangel’s Structural Film explores ideas familiar from the genre of structural film but transposed to the digital realm and taking Paik’s Zen for Film as its primary inspiration. In order to create Structural Film, Arcangel (born 1978) applied the “Aged Film” filter in Apple’s iMovie to a blank image, then exported the file into a QuickTime movie and had it transferred to 16mm film stock. An error occurred during the transfer, which resulted in the chance addition of colorful dots. The removal of pictorial content is a strategy for highlighting medial materialities, one that is employed in Paik’s Zen for Film, JODI’s Untitled Game, and many structural films from the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas Structural Film reveals the visible traces engendered by a single performative instance of medial migration, Zen for Film involves the process of collecting and the manifestation of deterioration each time the work materializes. —LS

Image: © Cory Arcangel. Courtesy of Cory Arcangel and Team Gallery.