Mano - All descriptions
LEISURE FACTORY, 2012
'You deserve a minute off' was the title of the simple task I offered on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Mechanical Turk is an online marketplace for work. Any US resident can commission a small task for a small fee to digital workers from all around the world. A task can be digitalization, transcribing visual or audio data, translating, writing reviews or comments or solving 'captchas'. My job offer was as follows: 'Stand up. Do 1 minute of exercise. Make a snapshot of yourself using your webcam. Upload the image to any image sharing service. Paste the URL of your uploaded image below and get paid 0.50$' The visual result of was a series of webcam portraits taken by Amazon's Mechanical Turk workers of themselves in their own working environment. The current series consists almost a hundred photos.
After got to know about the platform I became for a short period a worker myself. I experienced the true exploitation and the boring almost robotic, monotone tasks. And I made almost no money at all, at least an amount that has almost zero value in Western-Europe. But not in some other places.
I could not almost believe that there are hundreds and thousand of people working for this platform. I was initially interested and curious to find out who are they, to see these people, to look into their eye through a photo. Rule number two was: your face has to appear on the photo. I am fascinated by the tendencies in global capitalism and also the exploitation that is initially the base of the economic system called capitalism.
To offer a job on Mechanical Turk platform is almost as easy as updating your status or edit a wiki page. The body of the offer was simple, pure and clearly understandable and specific: use your webcam. This way I could achieve a secondary content: their 'working' environment which is in the case of these workers their own home sometimes even their own bedroom.
The last decision I had to make to define the amount of money I will give away after each completed task meaning one photo received. After a short research on the general amount of payment I decided to pay half a dollar for each photo – an amount that attracts these workers immediately. For them half a dollar is a lot of money for such a task that is easy and quick to complete.
AURA, 2012
Aura is a short one-shot video piece. On a plain white background three phones are lying next to each other by line and level. A hand comes into frame and unlocks the screens of the phones one after another. The first sound we hear is the smooth and tiny sound of the buttons.
The hand presses the play buttons on the screens: the one in the middle plays an archive film footage of a camera and a man behind it from the side, facing left. We hear him rolling his camera, he is filming. Suddenly this footage freezes and in the same moment the phone on the left (where the cameraman is facing) starts playing another archive film footage: a portrait of a man dressed up nicely according to the fashion of the beginning of the twenties century. He wears a suit with an elegant hat and round glasses. He looks into the camera (looks at the audience of this piece) smiles, grabs a cigarette and lights it up.
The phone in the middle repeats the clip which had been already played once, but this time, next to the freezed frame, and mirrored. Now the cameraman runs his camera towards the opposite side, the right. The phone / screen on the right starts playing a portrait of a middle-aged woman. She laughs with a very high tuned voice. She seems to be embarrassed (because of the presence of the camera?...) A hand moves a fourth phone into the frame. It holds it still for a moment right above the phone on the right side with the woman's portrait. A footage of children starts to play. The children make funny gestures for the camera. The hand places to phone in the right down corner of the frame. Shortly after the clip of the children stops and the hand takes the phone off screen again.
A noise is heard: it sourced from somewhere outside of the frame. A button had been pressed. Suddenly the plain background turns into a vibrating flickering background: it is an old light table, built for analogue photographers. All the footage on all the three phones blurs away and leaves only artefacts of film. Chemically destroyed and flooded frames in a hectic, randomized and chaotic order. After a while the light table get switched off again. On the two phones on the side another cameraman appears with his camera in front of him: this time facing the audience.
The hand presses the button on the phone and launches the camera application. On the phone in the middle, a live image appears of a young man looking right into the camera of the phone. Next to him we see his camera apparatus what was filming the whole scenery from the beginning. The piece ends when this young man shove off the phone to the his camera and presses the stop button on its back.
The reason that gave birth for this piece was an open call, a competition: Celluloid Remix.
My original approach after got to know about the competition was to create an 'analogue', physical sequencer installation made out of several phones using them as displays that would show clips simultaneously but also could be read as a sequence in time like a line as your read.
But at this point I had not seen yet the footage provided by the competition.
I have watched through carefully all the clips and I let myself to be influenced by them. This is how I arrived to the idea that this installation could better talk playfully about the different mediums and about their spacial relationship as an installation rather than building a narrative storyline.
LANGBEAT, 2010
Langbeat is less than two minutes long, colour, widescreen (16:9) video. It attends to be a social spot in a form of a music video. The structure and rhythm of the edit follows the rhythm of the music. The music builds up from tiny little sounds created by several human mouths, faces appearing on the screen in front of a white – and some exceptional point black – background. After the rhythm settled and starts repeating these mouths say simple words on different languages. The piece begins with the word 'check' from the background but screen remains black, then on the left half of the screen a profile face appears looking in the direction to the left and says 'bal' which means left in Hungarian and what the viewer hear only from the left speaker. Quickly following that the same face appears on the right half of the screen and says 'jobb' which means the just the opposite of 'bal'. The first word following the rhythm section is 'dots' pronounced with two different accents – American, and English – told by a freckled faced woman. Then a plush bear appears on screen say in a distorted voice 'bear'. As a sound continuation 'bier' and 'birra' (bier in Italian) and an comment of the the character drinking his bear 'lekker' (cool/super/delicious – a really common and multifunctional Dutch word with a lot of meanings) follows the plush puppy. A couple of continuous follow for instance 'beard – old – alt' or 'beard – barbe (beard, French) – barbe á papa (French expression for floss candy)'. In the end after dip to white and a low bass-wash a really basic and geometrical typo appears, letter by letter 'L A N G B E A T' which stand as a mosaic word for language + beat.
This piece is a response for an Europe wide open application for art students organized by ELIA (European League of the Institutes of the Arts, Amsterdam) with the financial support of the European Commission in 2010. The theme was linguistic and culture diversity in Europe, the application required a synopses or script of the maximum one and a half minute long spot, and a storyboard, and relevant previous work.
The core of Langbeat is its music even more the words included. The process started with a research on several European languages. The goal was to find nice pairs of words on different languages, what make sense either logically or meaningfully or in the aesthetics of the sound of the word itself. The meaning of these words also had to be taken account, as the meaning had to be easily visualizeable on screen.
After I felt the collection is vast enough I recorded these words and tiny rhythm sounds made by mouths and fingers and hands with actors in a sound studio, and started playing around with them on a sound sequencer. Due to the limit in time, a lot had to be dropped from the final version.
When the music was ready the following step was the video shooting in a studio with about twenty actors. Their role was pretty simple, they sat in the set with make-up, and with my instructions they repeated the words.
The post productions was also determined by the music, and it speed. Grading, colouring days of rendering...FINISH.