In 1971 Gardner hired Robert Fulton (the great grandson of the inventor of the steamboat), to teach filmmaking at the Carpenter Center for the 1971-72 year; and during this brief tenure, Fulton produced Reality's Invisible, one of the remarkable experimental documentaries of the era-- and (as is true for Fulton's entire oeuvre) of of the most underappreciated. Fulton would go on to make a substantial body of work --though as yet, no one has compiled anything like a definitive Fulton filmography... 　　[...] 　　In keeping with the Carpenter Center itself, which is described on the Center's website as a reflection of Le Corbusier's belief that " a building devoted to the visual arts must be an experience of freedom and unbound creativity" and must represent a "'synthesis of the arts', a union of architecture with painting, sculpture," Fulton's film provides a cinematic experience as far from the conventional as the Carpenter Center is from the Harvard buildings that surround it. Indeed, the experience of Reality's Invisible often verges on the overwhelming; it combines myriad kinds of imagery and approaches to shooting with dizzying editing to provide a phantasmagoria of life in and around the building and a paean to unbounded cinematic freedom. Reality's Invisible has the celebratory energy of Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) but without the structure provided by that City Symphony's composite day -- though as Reality's Invisible unfolds, we do begin to recognize a variety of motifs in addition to the Carpenter Center building itself: particular individuals (including Robert Gardner)), kinds of activities, editing rhythms. 　　[...] 　　...Reality's Invisible is full of multilayered imagery: we are regularly seeing one image and one kind of image through others. Fulton uses more, and more complex, layers of superimposition than any other filmmaker I am aware of, with the possible exception of Brakhage, whose Dog Star Man (1964) seems a particularly important influence of Fulton. Since each layer of Fulton's superimposition is made up of quickly shifting imagery, or is interrupted by split screen imagery of one design or another, the effect of Reality's Invisible is something like a cinekaleidoscope. To use a phrase of one of the students, Fulton's epic celebration of the Carpenter Center is a form of "serious playing around": it reflects on and embodies the high-spirited, deeply serious work and play that the building represents to him. 　　－－－from "American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn" by Scott MacDonald 　　What makes an institution? This is a question which animates Program, an ongoing project by artist Martin Beck at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts that has taken shape as a series of interventions, publications, and related events around the Center’s particular histories. For a recent episode of Program, Beck screened a fascinating yet largely forgotten work by Robert Fulton, Reality's Invisible, and produced a DVD with designer James Goggin of the otherwise unavailable film that was then distributed to students pursuing art and cinema at the university. 　　Fulton made the film during his brief time at Harvard, where he had been invited to teach by Robert Gardner, his friend and collaborator (Fulton would later serve as a cinematographer on Gardner’s 1981 documentary Deep Hearts, among others). Reality's Invisible could be described as a portrait of the Carpenter Center, yet it is a portrait of an extremely idiosyncratic and distinctive sort. Fulton moves us through the concrete space of the Center’s Le Corbusier-designed building—the only structure by the architect in North America—but, more centrally, presents us footage of students making and discussing their work alongside figures like Gardner, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, artist Stan Vanderbeek, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and graphic designer Toshi Katayama. Fulton reconfigures these basic elements in a radically non-linear fashion, structuring the film as a breathtakingly rapid stream of sounds and images, using oblique angles, saccadic camera movement, single-frame shots, dynamic superimpositions, elaborate rephotography, direct animation and numerous other techniques to convey the manifold activities and ideas generated within and around the Carpenter Center. 　　In a subsequent discussion with Arnheim and Gardner on Gardner’s television program Screening Room, Fulton described his process behind Reality's Invisible. “Normally we think of an image as an information-conveying unit,” he explained. “Well, more than that, it does have kinesthetic properties, in that it generates a certain energy, a certain ‘tone’ if you like.” Elsewhere, he describes his goal to “construct overall cadences” out of the records of individual perceptions, employing a musical metaphor in order to venture beyond historical notions of film form. Reality's Invisible thus serves as an exemplary instance of a larger project taking place around Boston that scholar Scott MacDonald has termed “the Cambridge turn,” a rethinking of documentary involving not only Gardner and his circle, but also filmmakers such as Frederick Wiseman, Ed Pincus, and Ross McElwee, to name just a few. Fulton’s film perfectly captures this era's spirit of inquiry, both through its unconventional strategies and the way its very composition mirrors an experimental ethos of art education. 　　－－－Lightindustry