Claudio's Thesis - printing page

CHAPTER 3: CASE STUDIES (THINKING ABOUT MY WORK THROUGH ANNOTATING OTHERS')

18-01-2023 - Notes on and from Tacita Dean's Disappearance at Sea (1996)

I came across Disappearance at Sea researching about Tacita Dean's work as a contemporary artist working with 16mm film, referring to a heritage of structural cinema tradition yet making work that is not only self-reflexive but also narrative and speculative. All elements that seem to resonate with my practice and that were also remarked during the assessment as something whose place in my work I need to consider. On top of this, this particular film seems a relevant example to reflect on in relation to the piece I want to make with the footage from the webcam scanning the beach at sunrise and at sunset that I presented in my proposal. (Part 2 W-O/A-NDERCAMS)

Tacita Dean's film is 14 minutes long. It is a sequence of scenes shot in and from a lighthouse, on the British coast, at sunset. Abstract close-ups of the lighthouse revolving lamp, and four different views of the seascape/horizon (two of them partially framed by the lighthouse architecture, two only consisting of the landscape view). As the sun sets, the shots get darker, the light emitted by the lamp becomes more visible, and is seen projected on the landscape. The end is a pitch black screen. The seven shots are approximately 2 minutes long each. It is shown as a 16mm projected loop.

Comparing Tacita Dean's work to the way I want to go about my piece seems to bring together some thematic and structural similarities as well as some differences.

1) I feel both works imply a reflection on human-made technologies to see and, through seeing, to grasp the world, to know it, to hold it. Tacita Dean's work speaks of such a human strive to see everything and, through seeing, to grasp the world, to control it, yet I feel the lighthouse - as a rather ouTacita Deanated device of seeing - places her reflection on a rather poetic, literary realm, rather than the sociopolitical one that appropriating a webcam's footage can imply. Also in Tacita Dean's work, the material features of the 16mm film apparatus - light shining through film - are more directly referring and mirroring with the natural sunlight that is present in the film.

The fact that I am appropriating fotage from a 24/7 live-stream online webcam calls into question the ubiquitous presence of visibility devices - cameras and screens - a "regime" of visibility, of mass production - and consumption - of images, to which we are constantly subject to, and object of. I feel this comes across through the inherent, material qualities of the footage I am using - the camera movements, the lo-fi digital texture of the image. I feel I need to address it more directly in the way I engage with such footage and the webcam's own presence, as a physical object in a physical place.

I believe that my interest in blindness - or the failure of the act of seeing and making images - has to do with this, as an interest towards a possible way out, an escape from such a state of hyper-visibility and hyper-exposure to images.

On a more "formal" level, in my footage, the point of view is that of the webcam; the viewer coincides with the camera, their gazes coincide. In Tacita Dean's film the point of view of the camera is external, a third party. This creates a triangle play between the landscape, the lighthouse, the camera/spectator, a triangle that is staged through a shot-countershot structure. I don't have that. What does that add? Can I try to do a countershot of that particular webcam I am using? Is this what I should aim for when going and find the webcam? Maybe.

2) Both Tacita Dean's work and the one I intend to make strongly call into question the notion and the experience of time, both in similar and different ways. Tacita Dean's work addresses time as a cycle, as a perpetual repetition, rotation, again on a rather philosophical/phenomenological and poetic level. The perfect rotation of the lighthouse lamp is a strong metaphor for this.

The same happens wih the footage of my webcams, which also stage a cyclic structure of passing time. Yet, as they stream live, 24/7, they also confront the viewer with the continuity in time of the production of this imagery, with the specific nature of this digital gaze which is always on, as well as with the possibility/limits of a mediated, real-time experience of a place. The footage produced by the webcam can be retroactively watched for a limited period of 12 hours, after which it is permanently lost. A matter of disappearance here too, not only of a place into the darkness of the night, but of its volatile images floating on the internet.

3) In both works, the only human body that is at stake seems to be the one of the viewer, whose experience and position seems to be included as an inherent element in the piece through the durational, prolonged watching act that the work requires. No other living bodies are in sight in Tacita Dean's film. What if - in my work - I appear in the webcam's visual field? That's another body. My own, but also a projection for the viewer. What would that mean, to place myself in that imagery? To let my own figure in it, caught by that gaze? What new relationships with the camera's point of view would be established? What tensions would become visible? What would that presence speak of in terms of contemporary states of image production and visibility? 4) Both pieces confront the viewer with a contemplation of a deserted seascape and its horizon. Despite the different qualities and textures of their images, they appear to me as allegedly universal objects of human gaze, as catalysts for a tension, for a quest for something that is expressed through its staring at.