User:123cld
WHY
Dubai Dispositif is a 50-minute long film essay made from amateur travel footage uploaded on Youtube by ordinary people showing their experience of staying in Dubai. It is divided in seven sections - plus an intro and an outro - and can work both as a single screen film and a multi-channel installation - which I haven’t tested yet though. Every section has a title and is built around certain recurring elements of the original footage. The sections are organised in such an order that builds up a spatial experience throughout the city’s environments. The original footage is reframed by overlay black frames and it is accompanied by a text in the form of subtitles/captions. Dubai Dispositif deals mainly with notions of bodies, space (urban, architecture, environmental), (self-)representation, technology.
HOW
I binge-watched the footage and collected it - first by means of play listing, then by offline downloading. In the editing software I broke the videos into pieces, hunting and gathering recurring fragments - always different, always identical, which I then re-arranged in compilations - the seven sections of the film. I turned all the footage in black and white, to allow a more abstract, detached viewing, as well as to emphasise its always-different-always-identical nature. I reframed the footage with overlay black frames, intended to re-orientate the viewer’s gaze towards certain features of the images used that I found significant. Every section has its own specific framing. All along the editing process I wrote a text, by additional fragments, that combines essayistic elements, quotes from readings, personal notes. The text is superimposed onto the images to create an additional layer of interpretation and meaning. Finally, I extracted the original sound from the footage and made a drone-like, mostly low-pitched soundscape that complements the images on screen.
WHY
The film speculatively considers Dubai as a hotspot of our times; as a place in which certain tendencies and processes of our times take extreme forms and become therefore paradoxically visible. Dubai as an optical prism through which reality is decomposed and made visible; as a divination crystal ball in which, through its present, a possible future can be foreseen. The main intention of the work is therefore to intercept images coming from a radically different place, to penetrate into them deeply and dissect them, to then recompose them trying to bring to sight and understand how that “other”, faraway place is closely related to “our” present and near future. To generate speculative fiction from fragments of reality, in an exercise of alienation and projection.
