Here are some pictures of the paintings presented in the entrance hall of Sint-Lukas, Brussels in June 08. For a detailed look on the paintings go to http://www.disconnectedmacha.be and click on “anywhere reloaded” to see the digital portfolio. There is also a printed portfolio available on request.

anywhere reloaded, pigment on paper, mounted on board, 148×111cm, 2007/08

Transmedia is now over and I’m proudly graduated, after some deserved rest and a move to a new city that brought me closer to simultaneous happiness and loneliness, I can now show some screenshots of the video I’ve presented for the TM jury.

This work is part of my research on non-places, places of transit, displacement in relation to Marc Augé’s perception analyzed in “Non-Places, an Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity”. My interest in these places is when you stop or erase the movements or the elements that connect them to us. Then, they start to float, they become suspended, dis-connected and turn into this prophetical evocation of spaces described by Augé.

In the video work I presented I’ve worked with superimposition of video layers with 1 frame delay. In the final result there is up to 10.000 video layers and the work as been presented as a triptych of 1′03” projected in loop. While each video shows subtle changes in light, colours and shadows of individual movements, the triptych bring them in an uniform composition, erasing all identity or particularity. A certain boredom comes out of the repetition of this 1min video, but is necessary to avoid narration. This double repetition leads to a certain temporal suspension.

Just click on the images to enlarge them.

stills of video triptych, 1′03”, 2008

Illumination Rig by Graham Gussin, Glow Festival 2006, Newcastle (UK)

Graham Gussin’s work deals with human experience of the infinite, states of mind associated with the sublime. He provokes displacement of the viewer in a illusory, imaginary space that seems empty and quiet at first sight, but filled with this tension, desire that something might happen. He creates situations that examine our perception of the real and its relationship to imagined experience.

In this installation, he used lighting normally used for film productions. I’m interested in a similar approach to create a fictionalisation of urban space for Welcome to Anywhere. But i’d like to use a vibrant texture to project in order to blur the surface of the walls, floor,… and create a fictional door between physical and mental realities.

Last week-end, iMAL presented Stream On You, an event around streaming art practices with audio/visual performances.

One of the most accomplished installation was performed by nocinema, presenting a live video screening and live audio performance. nocinema proposes web interludes drawing upon strings of live streaming webcams across the world and sound from a shared soundfiles database which is fed and updated by a team of sound artists/partners.

You have to know that the choosen webcams are showing mainly non-sens or empty places, like a field, a construction space, a deserted parc, a road, a forest,… The sound can be digital or captured from everyday life environments.

I was really interested by the lag created between what you know beeing live streamed and the a-temporal aspects of the images and sound. This notion of present time soon desappears while the work becomes timeless, suspended, contemplative.

The fact that the stream is slowed down amplifies also this perception of a distorted time, but this effect is mainly due to the kind of images. Even if you often have a date and time on the video capture, the non situation of the image in a specifical time-space (due to the absence of individuals or event) makes it a-temporal. You could say, that it’s some garden or field from the early 21st century, but the banality of the scene and it’s non-narrative aspect make the scenesuspended in the time.

The variation of resolution between the different video captures was also visually interesting and probably contributed to the non-situation of the scene in a certain time-space.

The overall impression is to have a contemplative experience of live streamed sound and images that break any relation with their fundamental constitution: the present.Here and now seem to be extended.

Welcome to Anywhere is the future performance I’m preparing as part of the Anywhere Reloaded project.

Your can check the project proposal here: welcome-to-anywhere.pdf

Anywhere reloaded #04, painting on paper, 150×120cm, 2007

I’ve now a good series of painting material, but as an image is never experienced as a real situation and finally is only a strong personal interpretation of a space, I plan to prepare an intervention in it. I don’t know if I’ll get the authorisations for doing this at North Station Brussels, which belongs to SNCB, but it could actually be in any non-space. I need at least few equipment and access to electricity.

My idea is to fictionalise the space by use of lights and a certain “mise en scene” in order to allows individuals to perceive it differently. Once the gap created, the viewer becomes actor of the emptiness. He has to fill the time-space offered to him. This concept join what I developed with the “dis-connected project” where the emptiness available in the “helmets” allowed the users to dis-connect from their environment.

Again the ability of the spectator to experience something is only up to him. His openness to perception could create nothing or everything. But it brings me other questions, is it the person who sublimates the real or is it the real that sublimates his perception of appearances? It leads me to the notion of being “inhabit” (in french we say that an object or anything non human can be “habité”), it means that spaces could be alive and inhabit by their own soul. It could be natural, as mountains, or artificial spaces, as buildings, non-spaces.

In this research, I have noticed that it’s not necessarily me who is attracted by these spaces, but I have sometimes the impression that they call me, that they have their things to say to whom could be able to stop the flow and listen to them. Then, would those spaces be kind of monolith, making connections between the visible and the invisible? Between the surface where we walk and another level of reality?

Therefore the project of an intervention becomes more relevant. The paintings create an experience of a image, a vision of this concept of the monolith but would it be possible to make it experienced in real? Or would it remains a fantasy?

Some interesting books or articles:

O Altitudo!: An Interview with Robert Macfarlane, Brian Dillon, in Cabinet Magazine, The Mountains issue, 2007
Images, Perception and Stereotypes, Alia Rayyan, February 2006

Non-Lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Marc Augé, Seuil, 1992

Anywhere reloaded #03, painting on paper, 150×120cm, 2007

AR will be my main project during this year at Transmedia. I would like to develop further this research on the relationship between the objective status of our environment and the way we perceive it, this applied specifically to urban environment.

How do we fulfill this gap between us and the outside world? How could perception be translated and modulated by different media, according their own properties, in order to correspond to our own vision?
The relationship between us and our environement is not only managed by a functional aspect but also by the “affect” we develop in it. To understand this notion of affect and how it interfere, I started to translate my perception of urban spaces through photo, painting, video,…

I’m also interested by the ambiguity that could appears in this merging of media. The specificity of each one could be found in the different images and make them more complex.

But it’s first of all a certain atmosphere, a dis-connected time-space which can bring a certain idea of beauty in a fully factitious environment, that I’m looking for. How contemplation could emerge from artificiality?

In the environment where I move, there is no more question of natural landscapes but of ultra-functional urban space. Our brain adapt itself, try to generate visual pleasure and can create a sublimated vision of our environment. Thus a corridor, a waiting room, a staging area, a non-space can become contemplative, meaning generator.

Anywhere Reloaded is a research on the relation between the image, the time, the projection of the mind and the reality of the perception.

First, there is the moment, then there is the picture you made out of the moment. But it’s still not what you feel. Then you paint it, film it, take pictures again. You want to make it alive. But it remains a picture of what you’re looking for. It remains a substitute, an imperfect trial.

So you keep on trying…

Anywhere reloaded #02, painting on paper, 150×120cm, 2007