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.]
a descritpion of materials/images I'm working with - read them through, follow their development towards the final form they will find in the work
4 sketches (or: scenes, episodes, parts), ideally shown as loops on 4 different screens.
1)
Closeup shots of empty/blank/lost eyes of greek sculptures. Filmed in the Louvre or at the Phidias (most iconic sculptor from Athens V BC) exhibition in Rome. Filmed in 16mm, slowed down, (or photographed in 35mm), high contrast black and white. The abstract(ed) shape of the statues' eyes gradually forms on the screen, is lost and found continuously. You see it and you don't, and when you see it you are seen too. Continuously looking for something, and then losing it, and what you see are eyes looking at you. The shots are repeatedly interrupted by black frames of various length.
Images are accompanied by a text (ideally, on screen - maybe as a voiceover - need to figure it out) about:
how eyes were made in ancient sculptures (inlays made of precious materials or painted on stone, very detailed, accurately, realistically) and how they decayed and they are now lost
facts about the current state of technologies of creating so-called bionic eyes - nano-sensors to be implanted inside the eye to (partially) recover vision of blind people ( these researches are still failing - the Nanoretina model - the most successful so far -only provides black and white pixelated impression of light and darkness - an abstracted experience of the world through light and darkness. )
In both cases, small technological objects, made of rare/advanced materials, that speak of an obsession for the eye/vision. Both are implants, both related to a loss and a failure of vision - both creating a sense of vision - of seeing, of being seen.
A quest for seeing, of "making" eyes, while the viewers is drawn to look for and “make” the eyes on screen, actively engaging their own vision.
Other possible elements to speculate about:
threats to vision by screens and modern lifestyle - rise in myopia and vision loss - because of staring too close to things and screens, not being in nature ancient greeks theories of vision - very physical - images as objects colliding with eyes, or eyes shooting rays towards the world
...
actions/processes of wearing out of eyes/surfaces/materials
2)
A compilation of footage from 4 webcams on beaches in South Holland (from the strandweer.nu database). These webcams are set up on beaches for safety and weather reporting reasons. They perform automatic Pan-Tilt-Zoom movements, according to an internal algorithm, which makes them move unpredictably. They continuously scan the beach, the sea, the horizon, zooming in and out, and the feeling they provide is that of a constant quest for something, a quest that is always bound to fail. They seem to be seeing everything out there, yet what do they see? What are they looking for? Sidenote: these camera movements remind me vaguely of works by Michael snow (Wavelength, La Region Centrale), but in a lo-fi, internet-aesthetics way.
Footage fro these webcams will be taken on the 22nd of December 2023, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the day in which the amount of sunlight is lowest. The darkest day of the year. The footage will be taken in correspondance to the sunrise and sunset, capturing the transition from full darkness to full daylight, and back, and edited in a 2 hour loop - 1 hour at sunrise, 1 hour at sunset. . The edit jumps from one to another webcams along the 1 hour timeframe. From seeing almost nothing, to seeing everything in full sunlight. But what is this everything?
Long shots, slow movements, a contemplative mood, a quest for what? What are these cameras looking for? What are you - staring at these cameras - looking for? Also, the staging of a process of making - and unmaking - of an image, through natural sunlight, through a camera sensor, on a screen.
Extra element to explore, maybe in form of text on screen:
staring at the sea/horizon/sky as a primordially human act of seeing and of being in the world - the sea and the horizon as "screens" / to appear and disappear
to relieve eye strain they suggest to look out to open spaces/horizons
A parallel between the automatic Pan Tilt Zoom movements of these cameras and the 4 types of movements that human eyes can make (saccades, smooth pursuit movements, vergence movements, and vestibulo-ocular movements)
3)
A word - LOST, as found by chance and screenshot as part of a title of an article I was about to read on my computer - keep the same font, same typography - is blown up on a large LCD screen. The screen is filmed by a handheld 4K camera which moves in front of it, scanning the letters and the surface of the screen. The screen in filmed at various distances and angles. Letters are mixed, reversed, fragmented.
L O ST L S T O L T O S T O S L
The structure of the screen appears - as squared edges of the letters, as a grid of pixels, as flickering light interfering with the camera's own shutter speed.
A short (1/2 minute) video loop, with an equally short music loop/beat as a soundtrack . A sense of loss is evoked, literally and lyrically. The camera constantly loses its object, loses itself in the surface of the screen. A sense of loss that resonates with the other parts of the work. Loss of vision, lost eyes, lost at sea, lost in screens, pixels.
(2 and 3 could be merged into one single scene as there are some obvious links - scanning movements along a surface/screen, losing your eyes in the sea/in the pixels, looking out in the distance/looking very close up to a screen, the sea/horizon as a screen (devices of appearing/disappearing)
4)
(still figuring it out)
Abstract imagery - probably resulting from the various technical/structural experiment I made/will make in testing the possibilities of image making by staging extreme, absurd interaction/interference of cameras, screens, light - is run through some artificial intelligence application for visually impaired people that provide textual and audio description of images. Confronted with such imagery, they can't but fail in describing them. One of these apps often uses the formulas “I am not sure but this might be …” “I have doubts but…”.
Working on the failure of images as well as the failure of making meaning out of images.
Guessing what is seen is what our eyes constantly do.
Doubting about images, about their supposedly realistic content.
All 4 parts are at their core attempts at seeing. Quest for seeing, and to make sense of what is seen.
Losing/Failing vision and attempting to see. (expand)