Exhibition Electric Guitar, 2004, Solar, [VID] Video installation.Andy Warhol, well known for his pop paintings, also created significant works in film as well as the use of film projected as a three-dimensional environment. His work in multiple projection culminated in the multimedia environment entitled "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable".Every night during a one week period in 1966, film-maker Ronald Nameth filmed the "EPI", to make a comprehensive recording of the event. His film is now the only extensive motion picture document of "EM". Nameth edited versions for both single screen projection as well as for a 4-screen [VID] Video installation that re-creates the spatial experience of the"EPf'.Andy Warhol's... sensorium, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the Fillmore/Electric Circus era, and it is safe to say that the EPI has never been equaled. Similarly, Ronald Nameth's cinematic homage to the EPI stands as a paragon of excellence in the kinetic rock-show genre.Nameth managed to transform his film into something far more than a mere record of an event. Like Warhol's show, Nameth's EPI is an experience, not an idea. In fact, the ethos of the entire pop life-style seems to be synthesized in Nameth's dazzling kinesthetic master-piece. Here, form and content are virtually synonymous, and there is no misunderstanding what we see.It's as though the film itself has exploded and reassembled in a jumble of shards and prisms. Gerard Malanga and Ingrid Superstar dance frenetically to the music of the Velvet Underground (Heroin, European Son, and a quasi-East Indian composition), while their ghost images writhe in Warhol's Vinyl projected on a screen behind. There is a spectacular sense of frantic uncontrollable energy, communicated almost entirely by Nemeth's exquisite manipulation of the medium.EPI was photographed on color and black -and-white stock during one week of performances by Warhol's troupe. Because the environment was dark and because of the flash-cycle of the strobe lights, Nameth shot at eight frames per second and printed the footage at the regular twenty four fps. In addition, he developed a mathematical curve for repeated frames and super-impositions, so that the result is an eerie world of semi-slow motion against an aural background of incredible frenzy. Colors were superimposed over black-and-white negatives and vice-versa. An extraordinary off-color grainy effect resulted from pushing the ASA rating of his color stock; thus the images often seem to loose their cohesiveness as though wrenched apart by the sheer force of the environment.Watching the film is like dancing in a strobe room: time stops, motion retards, the body seems separated from the mind. The screen bleeds onto the walls, the seats. Flak bursts of fiery color explode with slow fury. Staccato strobe guns stitch galaxies of silverfish over slow motion, stopmotion close-ups of the dancers' dazed ecstatic faces.The most striking aspect of Nameth's work is his use of the freeze-frame to generate a sense of timelessness. Stop-motion is literally the death of the image: we are instantly cut off from the illusion of cinematic life - the immediacy of motion - and the image suddenly is relegated to the motionless past, leaving in its place a pervading aura of melancholy. Chris Marker's "La Jetée", Peter Goldman's "Echoes of Silence", and Truffaut's "400 Blows" are memorable for the kind of stop-frame work that Nameth raises to quintessential beauty. The final shots of Gerard Malanga tossing his head in slow motion and freezing in several positions create a ghostlike atmosphere, a timeless and ethereal mood that lingers and haunts long after the images fade.