Claudio's Thesis - printing page

07-02-24 - ONGOING TRANSFORMATIONS/DEVELOPMENTS (1)

I resolved to temporarily carry on only Part 1 - SENSORS and Part 2 - W-O/A-NDER-CAMS of my Project Proposal - the Greek statues' "lost" eyes piece and the "stranded beach webcam" one - as I feel those are the ones that offer more space for development. I now see Part 1 - SENSORS as a short (2/3 minutes) 16mm loop projection featuring images of those statues' eyes, filmed in black and white 16mm film stock at the Louvre museum and then edited at Filmwerkplaats - which I am now a member of. I will probably make use of so-called optical printing - an analogue technique of re-filming footage frame-by-frame, allowing to alter and affect it with effects such as slow motion, re-framing/cropping, focus/unfocus, over/under exposure. I am also considering to integrate in the edit - as elements fragmenting and layering the images of the eyes' statues - some added material interventions on the film surface that further contribute to the reflection on vision, blindness, physicality of images that my work is concerned with. The piece will be installed as a16mm projector running on a loop. I am planning to film the statues either in the Louvre in Paris or, better yet more challenging, in the National Museum in Athens, Greece.

Concerning Part 2 - W-O/A-NDER-CAMS, my current plans are considerably different from the ones outlined in the proposal. I have decided to work with footage from another webcam. The premises are still the same - real-time, automated scanning of a beach in south Holland live-streamed online - yet this new webcam has some features that makes it more interesting for my purposes. For example, it performs a full 360 degree turn (and not just 180), scanning not only the seafront but also what is behind - an eerie, deserted industrial landscape. Also, the focus of how i intend to work with such webcam has shifted. As I have started visiting these places where these webcams are located, I realized that what is at stake is related to notions of real-time-ness, of actually being in those places, and wandering through them, and engaging bodily with them; with the experience of them as opposed to the screened experience from the webcam. Notions of and tensions between presence and absence, showing and hiding, being there but not being seen, seeing without being there. Staging acts of looking at, of looking for, of being looked at. I am therefore working on the intention of pairing the footage from the webcam with "stolen" countershots that I take while crossing the landscape, trying to move in - or, to be - the blind spots of the webcam. A counter-act of image-making, where the scanning of the place is the one of my own body/eyes/camera crossing the landscape, revolving around the webcam, engaging with its field of vision and its limits. I am considering the possibility - and the implications - of letting myself, my own figure, be caught in between these two cameras, these two gazes. I feel these two parts - in all their differences - are nonetheless somehow alike. In both cases, a tension towards an object that holds - or used to hold - a gaze is displayed; a quest to go and see back these "seeing objects", to make body and eye contact with these. An intentional attempt at confronting that gaze, at establishing a relation with it, at questioning the reciprocal position in such interplay of seeing and being seen. I find it interesting that, after spending most of my time staring at a screen in the LB studios - which I consider anyway a fruitful experience, I am eventually heading out to such places - both fairly remote, be it Paris, Athens or the deserted landscape of the webcam - physically engaging with them, with a camera in my hands. Further reflections on this will come.