David Gatten

Gatten was born on February 11, 1971, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Robert and Florence Gatten. He lived in Michigan and Ohio until 1978, when the family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. Gatten's interest in the moving image originated in the mid-1980s, while in junior high school, when he began writing video game software with the TRS-80 operating system.[1]

He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Media Studies and Art History.[1] Gatten received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998, where he studied with Tatsu Aoki, Daniel Eisenberg and Shellie Fleming.[1] He is married to the filmmaker and writer Erin Espelie. They live together in the historic mining camp of Salina, Colorado, in Four Mile Canyon, Boulder County, with their daughter, Darwin Salina Gatten-Espelie.[10]

To produce What the Water Said, Nos.1-3, Gatten placed unexposed rolls of camera film in crab traps in the Atlantic Ocean off the South Carolina coast. The resulting sounds and images were produced by the physical and chemical interactions between the film's emulsion and the surrounding salt water, sand, rocks, crabs, fish, and underwater creatures.[11]

Gatten's previous film, Hardwood Process, takes the shape of a diary and also explored the "secret writing" of nature, combined with hand-processing of the 16mm film stock, use of natural dyes, toners, chemical treatments, optical and contact printing.[11][12] Gatten's rarely-screened first film, Silver Align, is a portrait of one of Gatten's mentors, the filmmaker Zack Stiglicz, filming on the shore of Lake Michigan.[13]

Since 1996, Gatten has been at work on a nine-part film series that takes as inspiration the 4,000-volume library of William Byrd II, an American colonial writer, planter, and government official. The individual films explore one or more titles from the library while also elliptically describing episodes in the lives of Byrd and his daughter Evelyn.[14] At least four parts were completed; the fifth part was in progress between 2005 and 2009.[1] Curator and writer Henriette Huldisch described the cycle as follows: "Focusing on specific volumes from the library, letters, and personal papers, Gatten's series probes the relationship between printed words and images, philosophical ideas, historical records, and biography. Throughout, his thematic concerns are realized in an array of cinematic processes and techniques, constituting a parallel survey of the medium's history."[14]

The second film in the cycle, The Great Art of Knowing, is generally regarded at Gatten's most important film and was listed among the "50 Best Films of the Decade" in a 2010 Film Comment critics poll.[15]

The series has been credited as having a "unique approach" to biography,[2] and the films have been compared to the works of artists Agnes Martin[3] and Marcel Broodthaers;[16] filmmakers Hollis Frampton,[1] Nathaniel Dorsky,[17] Robert Beavers[18] and Stan Brakhage;[19] poets Susan Howe[3] and e.e. cummings;[3] and philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Ludwig Wittgenstein.[19]

Portions of the cycle have been included in the 2002 and 2006 Whitney Biennial exhibitions [14][20] and in 2011 all four completed parts were included in "The Unfinished Film" exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery, alongside works by Joseph Cornell, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Dziga Vertov, and Andy Warhol.[21]

In addition to the Secret History films, Gatten is working on two additional film series, one under the umbrella title Films for Invisible Ink,[22] and including the films Case No. 71: Base-Plus-Fog and Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter [diminished by 1,794], as well as "the wedding vows film" Case No. 323: Once upon a Time in the West.[23]

Another series titled Continuous Quantities, that includes the films Journal and Remarks, filmed on the Galapagos Islands and Shrimp Boat Log.[24] Based on an entry from Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, the Continuous Quantities films are composed of shots 29 frames (1.2 seconds) in length.[24]

In 2015 Gatten was invited to become part of the international practiced-based research project "RESET THE APPARATUS!" based in Vienna, Austria.[25] In addition to his work in Vienna, Gatten's films were the subject of a recent retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea.[26] In 2016 he completed three new 16mm films.

• Silver Align (1995)
• Hardwood Process (1996)
• What the Water Said, nos. 1–3 (1998)
• Moxon's Mechanick Exercises or the Doctrine of Handy-works applied to the Art of Printing (1999)
• The Enjoyment of Reading (2001)
• Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002)
• Fragrant Portals, Bright Particulars and the Edge of Space (2003)
• The Great Art of Knowing (2004)
• Film for Invisible Ink case no. 71: Base-Plus-Fog (2006)
• What the Water Said, nos. 4–6 (2007)
• How to Conduct A Love Affair (2007)
• Today! (excerpts) (with Jessie Stead) (2008)
• Today! (excerpts #28 and #19) (with Jessie Stead) (2008)
• Film for Invisible Ink case no. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter [Diminished by 1,794] (2008)
• Journal and Remarks (2009)
• Ordinary Time, Equivocal Inventory (2009)
• So Sure of Nowhere Buying Times to Come (2010)
• Shrimp Boat Log (2006/2010)
• Film for Invisible Ink case no. 323: Once upon a Time in the West (2010)
• The Matter Propounded, of its Possibility or Impossibility, Treated in four Parts (2011)
• By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging (2012)
• The Extravagant Shadows (2012)
• What Places of Heaven, What Planets Directed, How Long the Effects? or, The General Accidents of the World (2013)
• Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (2015)
• Narrow Rivers, Open Seas & Seventeen Sunsets (Silences for A Merchant Mariner) (2016)
• Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (2016)
• China monumentis (A Roll for Peter) (2016)
• The Heart is the Residence of the Spirit (2019)
• This Day's Madness did prepare Tomorrow's Silence (with Ashley West) (2021)

• Faculty Page, Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, Duke University
• Cinema Contra
• A Roll for Peter