Claudio's Thesis - STUDIO DIARY / ANNOTATIONS

An episode from last year.

I can pinpoint a specific moment in my practice last year that I now recognize as an early, intuitive yet strikingly clear turning point. A turning point that brought up and matched, suddenly, unexpectedly, images and ideas, topics and tools, theory an praxis. An epiphanic encounter that caught my attention, marked my practice and whose resonance I can find in the project I am about to engage with.

For the "Writing through editing" workshop - in the second semester of the first year of the course, we were asked to make a short 5 minute video using footage from the Open Beelden online archive. The piece I made was titled A cameraman filming aka FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING ( https://youtu.be/l_7_ol6iXIo) and was built around a rather intriguing clip I accidentally found in the archive showing two cameramen filming each other on top of a skyscraper being built in New York in the 1920s. That short clip held a unique self-reflexive nature which immediately attracted me: its subject was not New York's fast vertical growth - which remained, literally - in the background, yet the very act of filmmaking, of making images of the world, by means of cameras and film. The subjects were the two filmmakers, filming each other while filming the world in front of them. I built my piece around that clip, editing it together with other footage - this time intentionally looked for, not found - that could bring out and develop that self-reflective nature even further. A film projector, a film strip burning, as well as various images of eyes. I wanted to weave together the act of seeing/watching, the act of making images through film, and a more intuitive notion of burning - light burns the chemicals to impress the celluloid, eyes burn when they stay open for too long or, a burning desire and need to see things. Along the whole piece, with varying intensity, I used a flickering effect, as a device to make the moving image apparatus visible and sensible the viewer; as a metaphor to recall the blinking of the eye, as well as the projector's presence; also, to trigger the physical perception of moving images and further play with the provoking idea of burning eyes.

In the first half of the piece, I crafted a quite intense sequence featuring a fast edit of footage of the two cameramen, images of eyes and text-on-screen playing with variations of the phrases EYES WATCHING / WATCHING EYES, all layered with a flickering effect. All of a sudden, the screens goes black, abruptly. After a few seconds, a new text-on-screen appears, white letters on black: EYES BURNING.

A hard flickering sequence - white and black frames only - follows, emphasizing even more the sensation of burning eyes. The same text stays on screen, floating through the flickering frames. Then, a countershot image of an unfocused projector beaming light towards the camera appears - as if it was the source of that flickering sequence, and brings back the piece to figurative imagery. The piece goes on.

Something very powerful seemed to happen here, which I only realised when watching the final edit of the work. The moment the screen goes black, the viewer's eyes - until then hit and overstimulated by the mass of fast edited images - are caught unprepared. On that unexpected pitch black screen, afterimages appear, the flickering effect seems to continue, the physical effect of the images seen before, their backlash on the viewer's retinas, is felt. Then, on that same black, the text appears. EYES BURNING. A subtle yet precise description not only of some of the images seen before - eyes looking at the camera, shedding tears - but also of the actual physical sensation built and triggered by those very images and the way they had been edited, and felt by the viewer in that specific moment of the piece. Then, a coincidence, a coming together of images seen, physical perception and conceptual meaning.

This effect was not intentional. Of course, it was the result, of a rational process of editing, yet I only realized its potential the moment I exported the final edit. It was an epiphanic moment, whose encounter was unexpected and striking. I don't think I got it immediately, I needed time to digest it, to think about it, yet - now - I feel it is an effective reference point in showing me a direction I want to pursue in my future practice, and that contains, in a nutshell, some elements whose use and potential I want to explore in making this new project.

Abstract, minimal imagery, working with light as a raw material, self reflection on the medium, embodied/physical/haptic (?) experience of images. Engaging and challenging the viewer's experience of moving images, their position in regards to them, both on a conceptual level and on a physical one. Making the viewer conscious of the experience of viewing,

Also, challenging their perception, requiring

MAKING THE VIEWER CONSCIOUS OF THE EXPERIENCE OF VIEWING THE PIECE.

These are all elements I want to deal with in making this new project.

Please consider what this mirroring of words does, EYES WATCHING / WATCHING EYES seems redundant, but for me it suggests a shift from the inside of the film to the outside, between the object (the film) and the viewer, between the semiotics and the affect. the dash / is like a hinge that meaning swings on. By this logic FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING could be FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING/BURNINGWATCHINGFILMING. The material and the experience of the material feedback. This is consistent with your desire to work on the border between blindness and sight; visibility and invisibility.]