ARCHIVE

Blow (work-in-progress) - Hector Rodriguez

Text of the film

“A character cannot become aware of us. We are not in their presence. They are in our presence. We do not occupy the same space. We do, however, occupy the same time. And the time is always now. Time is measured solely by what is now happening to them, for what they are doing now is all that is happening.

Our link to the world is broken. We need reasons to believe in this world. To believe in the world is to believe in the body. The awareness of movement is our basic perceptual organ.

Animation describes a figure which is always in the process of being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their course. The continuity of the movement describes the figure.

Being is becoming.”

Artist's statement

Blow explores the relationship between the recognition of form and the perception of movement.

Blow is a commentary on Andy Warhol’s film Blow Job, which consists of close-ups of a young man’s face. Blow uses a motion-tracking software created by the artist to analyze the movement of the face in Warhol’s film, and to visualize the motion vectors as clusters of lines and points. This technique calls attention to the rhythmic quality of the head’s motion.

Although the outline of the face dissolves into a multiplicity of abstract forms, its basic human features remain strangely recognizable. The experience of looking at the screen thus becomes a struggle to recognize the human face in the process of its formation, mutation, and dissolution. Figure is movement, and movement alone gives birth to the figure.

In addition to the images,Blow also includes snippets of text, drawn by hand. The content is a tissue of quotations from various philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. These quotations raise issues about movement, recognition, and the nature of fiction.

Wide Rothko

Joao Vasco Paiva

Wide Rothko is an audiovisual piece. What's presented at Experimenta is a screening version.
The work explores the relations between abstract and figurative imagery.

Through time delay and spacial extension, a new kind of visualization is created.
Through the creation of patterns enabled by the multiplication of pixels in the frame, the video is displayed in the form of a horizontal strip along the projected area.

Wide Rothko was recorded in Yunnan and Hong Kong .
The method of processing and manipulating the footage was only applied afterwards. The footage was originally taken with an awareness of strangeness and exoticism. During the process of  shooting / recording, the author searches for structure -- both visual and sonic structure.
The idea of the exotic is explored here as the recognition of contextual familiarities but embedded in different shapes and motion.
The confrontation with a different culture creates the perfect situation for an understanding of the culture not by historical and  contextual connotations, but instead, by the motion, form and sound that characterizes it.

Wide Rothko explores 2-D space representation. Behind the representative qualities of the image there's the creation of a new hybrid space -- the space of  the image itself and the world that, instead of being re-created, is in itself created.