Associação Cultural Videobrasil

“Risks of the Present Time” - by André Brasil, Christine Mello and Eduardo de Jesus

Risks of the Present Time

André Brasil, Christine Mello and Eduardo de Jesus

Poetry is risk. The famous poem-synthesis, proclaimed in a number of different supports by Augusto de Campos, reverberates strangely and inversely in Andrew Grove's(1) half-mystical, half-entrepreneurial formula: “only the paranoid survive”. For Intel's Chairman of the Board, in a society characterized by risk and instability, we must all feel constantly threatened. In the light of Grove's cynical lucidity, the immediate conclusion is that contemporary capitalism, quite apart from its furthering of exclusion and economic disparities, operates perversely in the realm of subjectivities: we are urged to take a stance against everything and against everybody, as part of a risky individualistic competitive strategy.

Whatever we call it - the society of risk, uncertainty or instability - contemporary experience is fragile: we are living on a tightrope, in a precarious balance between the prospect of finally enjoying, once and for all, the vaunted advances of techno-science, and the prospect - touted in the media and in scientific discourse - of the end itself (of history, of art, of science, of philosophy, of mankind, of life).

Above all else, risk is a rhetoric (which does not mean that it is not real or that it does not interfere in a very concrete way in our lives). Risk becomes reality when it has already become a catastrophe or a damage. In order to remain a risk it must stay latent, imminent, about to happen. That is why risk is always on the edge of discourse, on its boundaries.

The media seems to be one of the major sources of the discourse on risk today: in the media we are always on the brink of an environmental catastrophe, of a nuclear war, a terrorist attack, about to be infected by an incurable virus, to lose our jobs, to have our homes burgled, or to undergo an economic crisis. Increasingly present in our daily lives, and in its sheer media visibility, the discourse of risk eventually legitimizes control. In the face of the looming risk, we demand more and more security, more and more policing, more and more surveillance, more and more control. As Giorgio Agamben(2) suggests, instability legitimizes the transformation of political power into police power.

This means that contemporary experience stems from a contradictory desire: invited to become the entrepreneurs of our own selves, urged to tap into information, entertainment and consumption networks, we must constantly run risks, but - no, thank you very much - we do not wish to assume these risks. What immediately results from this contradiction is a sort of asepsis of experience: however, not without experience becoming first information, this new kind of communication that clarifies and explains everything.(3)

Asepsis of space, which becomes increasingly transparent, visible, mapped and monitored in its macro- and micro-physical dimensions. Asepsis of the body, which can be scanned and investigated by increasingly sophisticated optical instruments and, now that its operational code has been discovered, can be manipulated indefinitely.

But we are concerned mainly with time here. We know that the array of techniques developed in the field of communication and computing, biotechnology and genetic engineering, are changing our experience of time, which seems to be increasingly driven by ideas of predictability and forecasting.

Through increasingly sophisticated simulation techniques, used in a bewildering variety of fields - from genetics to finance - we have made the unforeseen predictable, we have translated the possible into measurable, calculable and pre-testable information. If, as Bellour writes, “time constructs the image by devouring it like a cigarette burning down”(4), the film is now playing backwards: it is the image - plastic, dynamic and processual - that consumes time, in its eagerness to anticipate it.

Chance, the unforeseen, that which is still coming to light: what the future represents in terms of risk, virtuality or the irreducible difference from the present, can now be monitored and controlled by means of every kind of preventive and modeling technique. In other words, to reduce what is “risky” in experience we must hedge ourselves around by more and more information, making our daily existence increasingly in-formed. As Jean-Louis Comolli(5) would say, we live increasingly scripted lives, protected from the “risk of the real”.

Within this context the electronic and digital image has an ambiguous status. On the one hand, having been made information, it can be part of surveillance and modeling devices, increasing the transparency of space and the predictability of the climate. On the other hand, taken over by contemporary artistic and political strategies, it can reinvent spaces of uncontrol and once again leave the future wide open to risk. Only that it is now a new type of risk, the risk of esthetic experience, that risk capable of reconfiguring our field of possibilities, of expanding our horizons of expectations and the scope of what we deem “thinkable”.

Electronic risks

In its extreme instability - “dust in one's eyes”, as Fargier(6) so aptly puts it - the electronic image is inserted historically and semiotically into the several artistic and communicational fields, infiltrating, opening up pathways between one and the other, transforming them and being transformed by them. Today, more than ever before, electronic production is undergoing expressive proliferation, creating impure, unpredictable forms: forms that for this very reason do not fit snugly into generic classifications. This all helps make the field of electronic production a risk zone, a space of tension between cultural strata and languages.

This production is also expansive. Electronic images - analogical or digital - go beyond the limits of the screen, redesigning urban and domestic spaces, sheltering and changing subjectivities. If, as Philippe Dubois(7) puts it, we are living in a sort of “video-state”, this is because contemporary experience, from television to security cameras, is more and more intensely mediated and reconfigured by the range of electronic devices that are working ubiquitously and instantaneously. The electronic image thus becomes a state of the image and of reality itself: it is through it that other images and our own presence in the world are processed and conceived of.

However, beyond its expansive and permeable nature, the electronic image must be deemed risky owing mainly to its event-like dimension. This dimension can be investigated in several ways. One has to do with the particular means by which the electronic image operates the inscription of time: its temporal dimension and its processual character make it a true electronic event. As Arlindo Machado states, the videographic framework does not exist in space, but only in the duration of a sweep across the screen. Electronic images, he goes on to say, “are no longer the expressions of a geometry, but rather of a geology, in other words, of an inscription of time on space. Time is thus no longer what it was in the cinema, that which comes between one frame and the next, but that which is inscribed in the unfolding of the sweeping lines and superimposition in the frame”(8). An electronic event, therefore, which weaves itself in processual fashion, at the very moment when the image forms upon the screen. The risk of the image that permeates and is permeated by the risk of experience.

There is another way of thinking about the event-like status of the electronic image. Less as the slicing of an instant than as the uninterrupted flow of light signals, the electronic image is processed in real time and often enables a coincidence between the moment when the image is produced and when it is shown. Real time allied to telepresence makes ours a live society, continually being overlaid, in an expanded present of several spaces and temporalities. We might critically add, with Virilio(9), that images transmitted instantaneously and at a distance, enabled by electronic and digital technologies, dominate the thing shown, provoking a kind of accident, a short circuit between presence and distance. It is thus a “paradoxical era of images”(10).

Despite all the political and esthetic ambiguities created by this paradox, the openness to real time and to the ceaseless flow of the present also opens up the image to the event in its unpredictable emerging. The contingency of its capture and its instantaneous circulation permeates the image with the random, with (quasi) events.

Beyond its merely technical or technological aspects, yet indissociable from them, the esthetic appropriation of the electronic image takes place in the context of its temporal, processual and event-like nature. An artist working with the electronic source material will mould and manipulate, or rather, modulate time itself. He or she can therefore expose the image to duration, to the event, to the risk of present time and all that this entails in terms of contingency and uncontrollableness.

Being open to duration the image can thus accommodate the possible. It can often even provoke it, as in certain documental or performative procedures that aim less to record than to produce an experience (which would not take place without the intervention of someone behind the camera producing it).

The event, “the unexpected of all expectation”, as Blanchot might put it, is that which can affect us and thus reconfigure or expand our field of possibilities: when it pierces the image in its unseizable appearing, the event can make us think what was previously unthinkable for us. This opens up a risky territory: “a placeless space and an unengendering time”(11), in which moves “a thought that does not yet think”(12). Ambiguous, precarious, unstable, the image installs itself within this risk zone, where discernment, decision, explanation and action are impossible. All that remains for us is “an effort, not to express that which we know, but to feel that which we do not know.”(13).

We can take up once more Augusto de Campos' famous poem that opened this essay: poetic risk in many ways differs from the risk which, through techno-scientific discourse or media discourse, leaves us in a state of constant alert, or constant paranoia. While the latter is increasingly used in order to legitimize control, invasion of privacy and war (infinite justice, some might say), it is the former that can overturn our certainties: it thus reinvents our horizon of expectations, our field of possibilities. It is less a case of foreseeing the future in order to colonize it, than of opening up as-yet unheard-of virtualities.

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(1) Apud Sibila, Paula. O homem pós-orgânico: corpo, subjetividade e tecnologias digitais. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2002.

(2) Agamben, Giorgio. Sobre a segurança e o terror. In: Cocco, G. & Hopstein, G. (org.). As multidões e o império: entre globalização da guerra e universalização dos direitos. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A Editora, 2002.

(3) Benjamin, Walter. Obras Escolhidas:

magia e técnica, arte e política. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994.

(4) Bellour, Raymond. Entre-imagens. Campinas: Papirus, 1997, p. 41.

(5) Comolli, Jean-Louis. Cinema contra espetáculo. In: FORUMDOC.BH.2001. Belo Horizonte, 2001.

(6) Fargier, Jean-Paul. Poeira nos olhos.

In: Parente, André (org.). Imagem Máquina. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1993.

(7) Dubois, Philippe. Cinema, Vídeo, Godard. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2004.

(8) Machado, Arlindo. Máquina e imaginário. O desafio das poéticas tecnológicas. São Paulo: Edusp, 1996, p. 52.

(9) Virilio, Paul. A imagem virtual mental e instrumental. In: Parente, A. (org.). Imagem Máquina. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1993.

(10) Idem.

(11) Blanchot, Maurice. O livro por vir. Lisboa: Relógio D'água, 1984, p. 88.

(12) Idem, p. 60.

(13) Blanchot, Maurice. À parte do fogo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1997.

BRASIL, André; JESUS, Eduardo de; MELLO, Christine. "Risks of the Present Time". In: Caderno Videobrasil. Associação Cultural Videobrasil, nº1, pp. 101-103, São Paulo, 2005.

essay_ Marcellvs L. "Almost nothing: affection" - by André Brasil

Almost nothing: affection

8762

“- To see is a motion too.

- To see presumes a paced, measurable separation; to see is always to see at a distance, but also to allow distance to give back to us all that it takes away from us. [...]

- To see is to perceive immediately far away.” (Blanchot)

0964 A man walks. Steady steps, from far away. He comes closer, as the fixed camera follows him. An overflow forms a sort of river that crosses the street he walks on. The camera's digital zoom renders the scene impressionist, trembling, tenuous, breaking up the field depth. In a natural way, without hesitation, the man starts crossing the river, sinking slowly until his body is almost fully covered. He steps out of the water, continues to walk the streets and passes by the camera without acknowledging it. The video ends when the man steps out of the scene. No soundtrack, no credits, no acknowledgements, no sponsors.

9564 A highway. Dilated landscape: the cars speeding by contribute to highlight the alienation of the man who walks. The camera follows as he moves slowly. The duration of the scene increases, little by little, our anguish. Immersed, distracted from the vertigo of the cars, he walks along the highway shoulder. The traffic is not as interesting to him as the waste that he meticulously collects from the asphalt. The video is abruptly interrupted by a black screen: the traveler goes on his way.

7692 Here we find the same man, enraptured by his own alienation. He is now standing in a hectic downtown scenery, among cars, motorcycles, and trucks. There is smoke all around, and the air is dilated by the asphalt heat. A bus cuts through the scene, and then the man is no longer there.

7439 It is night. The streets are empty, silent. In a single take we see a horse standing on the asphalt and, a little above him, behind the glass wall of a brightly lit gym, a lonely man walks on a gym mat. There is the motionless horse, the darkened street, the excessive transparency of the gym. The man walks fast over the mat, without leaving the place where he stands.

3476 Sea of white. The saturated image - produced by means of an excessive opening of the camera diaphragm - renders the landscape and the people rarefied. The people are fishing, throwing a net and then pulling it back. An ordinary scene, though slightly displaced: standing at an interstice where this world, as well as a whole other world, have been simultaneously produced.

8879 Shadows on the outside wall of a house. They slide around, modulated by the car lights. Images in motion, shocks, juxtapositions, interruptions: the world is making cinema.

0793 Between one black screen and another, something passes by, crosses the image and goes on beyond, way past it. This something - life (alien, ordinary, undetermined) - moves on, leaks out, escapes away from all sides of the image. Thus are the “rhizomes”, which is how Marcellvs names his videos: image sections, interrupted worlds, cut off, extracted, excavated, ripped away, and then sent back to life.

2418 In order to produce his images, Marcellvs seems to be in an ambiguous zone, combining attention, belief, and detachment. The contingency of capturing these events (or near-events) is fundamental to the production of the videos. Nevertheless, there is no belief in the illusion that just looking at the world would be enough for it to reveal itself to our eyes: pure, naive, transparent.

This sort of “distracted attention” enables a meeting - affection (in the literal meaning of affecting and being affected) - of the eye and the world: a meeting which is distended by time, mediated by the camera, transfigured by digital editing (economical, in most cases).

2376 Nothing here is pure and natural. Despite their apparent crudeness, these are electronic landscapes, mediatized happenings, worlds that can only emerge in between: the event and its dissolution into pixels and electrons.

2998 The camera (eye, brain, spirit) awaits. However, this is not “bad hope”, the one which waits for the Same (as we had comfortably foreseen). This is about hope that is open to the “unexpected in every hope.” As Blanchot suggests, “hope is only true hope when it aspires to give us, in the future of a promise, that which it is”.

3470 “That which it is, is presence.” The event in its eventuality.

0687 If we are to believe in Bergson, then the world is a group of images that clash with each other, sliding over one another. Given this continuous and chaotic motion, we can intervene in two ways: either by blocking the motion, obstructing it, coaching it, turning the images of the world into mere repetitions of the images of the world that we are used to; or just by opening up passages, fissures, breaches through which images (other images, different, weird) can leak out, affect us, and then continue with their mundane motion.

The first option yields a comforting thought, offering us that which is known and recognizable; after all, it always leads us to the Same. Quite different is the (drifting) thought produced by the power of image in motion: precarious, hesitating, rough, “almost” done and then, soon thereafter, undone, it is a sort of “thought which does not think yet” (Blanchot). Or, as Rancière put it, “a thought that has become strange to itself: a product that is identical to the non-product, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, “logos” that is identical to “pathos”, an intention of the unintentional”. Aesthetic thought, if we may call it that.

0378 During one of our conversations (we both wish they were more frequent), Marcellvs recalls a scene from Tarkovsky (“The mirror”): someone walks on a green, wide, motionless field. The fixed camera follows him, giving time the time it needs. It does not crave, does not interrupt, or accelerate motion. The scene lasts long and almost nothing happens: except for the fact that someone walks. Then, intense and subtle at the same time, the wind cuts through the image, shaking up the whole field. A light thought, a trembling goes through us like a shiver.

3354 After exhibiting one of his pieces, upon reflecting on the audience's receptiveness, the artist utters a precise diagnosis: “time is political”. He was referring to the extended duration of his videos, to the idle, slow timing in them.

Yes, in many cases, time is political. Especially in the case of these “videorhizomes”, since duration is what allows us to detect, in the mundane, the regular, the ordinary, its extraordinary power, routinely suffocated by haste: that which journalists miss out, in their hurried listening; that which the editor, under the pressure of his deadline, leaves out; that which the documentarist, who is concerned with the pertinence of his story, refuses to perceive; that which we, as spectators, thirsty for more and more new images, cannot wait for: the happening (or a near-happening).

If these happenings are rare - contrary to what the TV news try to make us believe -, it is because they are associated with time, they need duration in order to happen (so they can be perceived, and so they can affect us). Time is political because it is time that enables us, through images, to catch a glimpse, or better yet, to invent happenings and the unstable “worlds” that emerge around it. Therefore, time and duration elicit new partitions of the sensible (Rancière): new forms of perception and visibility, new configurations of what is possible and thinkable. That is why time is political and, for that same reason, compulsorily aesthetic.

9643 The man walks. But the way in which he appears and walks through the image is quite different from what we see in reality shows, TV newscasts, and certain documentary films - all of which approach ordinary, regular life, but are unable to escape from the comfort of stereotypes: they reduce the other's difference to the Same, to that which has already been recognized, and is already expected.

He who walks through Marcellvs' videos seem more like a “man without qualities” (Musil), with no name and no possessions. That man is kept there in his weird singularity, he cannot be captured by clichés, he is impervious to predefined categories that we use in order to protect ourselves (profession, gender, class, nationality...). The ordinary is thus maintained in its “ordinarity”, in its raw power: “the being plus the power of being”, as Blanchot would put it.

7854 “The being is the common being” (Agamben). A singular being who is always to come, who is not reduced to a stereotype, neither, on the other hand, vanishes anonymously into the crowd. It is a regular being, but not an indifferent one: the man who walks the street and does not hesitate to cross the river; or he who walks along the highway shoulder, alien to the cars, attentive to the waste.

“Quodlibet ens”: a common being, Agamben tells us, “contains something that has to do with will (“libet”), as the common being establishes an original relationship with desire”.

8642 The happening - this precarious moment in which, circumstantially though it may be, a “truth” is outlined - cannot be captured merely by technical dexterity, neither by formal virtuosity: more than just a technique, inseparable from aesthetic, first of all, this is about image ethics. Much more than a technological tool, even more than a language tool, the camera becomes part of a way of seeing, being, and acting in the world.

6798 In a world that has been transformed into image, extracting images from the cliché in which we have transformed the world is a difficult task, although a necessary one. This is what these “videorhizomes” suggest to us, standing in that undistinguishable border between ethics, politics, and aesthetics.

5558 To see, to perceive, to listen, to participate in the time flow - a policy; to shape, or better yet, to modulate time (and extracting other worlds from it) - an aesthetic; to allow time to pass through us, to shape us, and to recreate us - an ethic.

9875 In successive dice rolls, Marcellvs usually attributes random numbers to his videos: 0314, 7077, 5040, 8011, 2004, 3172, 0667. Then he sends them, one by one, to randomly chosen addresses in the phone book. Who receives the videos, how do they receive them, to what end? It doesn't matter. That which is fundamental is the random, fragile meeting of the happening with the not-happening: the ordinary man who produced the images; the ordinary men who sometimes inhabit the images; the ordinary man who receives the videotapes by mail. The community that is thus fleetingly invented, which is connected by fragile wires.

0873 This is the result of these rhizomes, after all: delicate wires, nearly imperceptible. Almost nothing: affection.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "ff>>dossier 012>>marcellvs l.". Available at: . São Paulo, June, 2005.

essay_ Gisela Motta and Leandro Lima_ "The poetics of the loop" - by André Brasil

The poetics of the loop

1. Plain, clean, concise images. Possessing undeniable formal and technical accuracy, the images created by Leandro Lima and Gisela Motta delude the viewer: their ambiguity is not easily apprehended, for they are protected by an apparent transparency. But there is something there, a remaining discomfort: back rumour, subtle trembling.

2. The girl swings (sem título #4 - untitled #4, 1999). A banal image, repetitive in its naivety. Image-cliché: countless comings and goings. However, there is something strange about this so familiar scene, something produced by minimal displacements: saturated colours, artificial landscape, abstracted girl.

The oblique framing, the convex look. And there, between what has been minimally displaced, the world intensely becomes another. The swing, the landscape, the movement, the camera, the look: from cliché to vertigo, everything seems loose.

3. If the green colour is the greenest in the world (Leminski), what to say about this impossible green? (verde.dxf - green.dxf, Lima, 2004) When it is artificially stamped on the grass, the paradox establishes itself: this colour is so green that this world cannot be the one we know!

And how about this blue, bluer than the blue colour itself? Geometrically divided into two: the sea, the sky, the white line. Horizontal blue. If Klein Blue - Yves Klein's hallmark - is the material blue of paint, the body and the performance, and if the blue of Magritte's skies was purposely rarefied, stylised and oneiric, this blue.dxf (azul.dxf, Lima, 1998/2002) is pure synthesis: it seems to exist only as a result of a combination of digits.

The colours blue, green, red and yellow form a synthetic landscape in Leandro and Gisela's photographs, videos and installations. An ambiguous landscape: so similar and, at the same time, so distant from the natural world.

4. Water is a constant (analógico #2 - analogical #2, 1998; sem título #5 - untitled #5, 2002). It flows and re-flows, sounds and resounds. But its fluidity is imprisoned in an endless loop. Again, there is a synthetic environment, as the water of the laboratories (that was fiction in the old days, but now is often in the daily news), where all kinds of raw materials are synthesized, and organic matters are created and duplicated.

5. In analógico #3 (analogical #3, Lima, 1998), the electronic water of a swimming pool made of pixels. Isn't that our situation between the images? Drift, immersion, dive, drowning (Motta, 2003). Sensory experience, more than a merely visual one.

6. In Leandro and Gisela's work, the loop becomes a poetical strategy: it is economical, automatic, circular; it impedes the image to refer to a possible past or to succeed in constructing a future image. In loop mode, the image cannot narrate or foresee. It only displays itself, it exhibits its automatism. As if the world machine had stopped working, unable to produce new experiences.

But if the loop is repetition, the difference is produced by the encounter between the thought and the work. The repetition does not stop, but the viewer's thought flows continuously. And the circle becomes an ellipse, for, during the repetition, the image is being constantly altered by different thoughts. As the well-known Heraclitus' river: always the same and always another.

7. The landscape is a natural one; the scene is simple, transparent: some people taking a walk between the trees of a wood (que é de? - that is of?, 2003). But, as in Magritte's Carte Blanche (1965), this between becomes an interstice where the beings disappear. Between: interface, space for passing. As if the reality was full of cuts through which the beings could cross to other invisible, unknown, fantastic domains.

But if Magritte's landscape is intense and intentionally oneiric and surreal, Leandro and Gisela's wood is between banality and fantasy, ordinary reality and imagination.

The installation becomes more ambiguous with the device created for this work: the image appears only when it is projected on the viewer's shadow. A complex game of appearing and disappearing, of visible and invisible worlds.

8. The wood is removed, but there are still people passing by. In this work (marrom - brown, 2002), as simple as disconcerting, the visitors are filmed while they go through the exposition (“now the objects perceive me”, Paul Klee would say). In the projection, people are passing by from one place to another, but there is no scenery. That can be any place: an exposition? A shopping centre? A studio where a TV commercial is being filmed? The scene becomes even faker with the use of chroma key.

It is not necessary to cut the landscape, for it has already been removed: from the image as a place of transit to the image as a non-place. Or a nowhere place.

9. What is expected from a body? That it lives. What is expected from a performance? That it happens. In the (almost or anti-) performances by Leandro and Gisela (sem título # 1, 2,3 - untitled #1, 2, 3), the body simply does not respond. Or, when it does respond, it is taken over by a disturbing automatism (or autism). Automaton-body, strange body. Body in loop mode.

10. Or a body upside-down (interlúdio - interlude, 2003), lying on its own carapace, unable to turn over to its natural position (impossible not to think about Gregor Samsa).

11. How strange is this world created by Gisela and Leandro: disconcerting, fantastic, paradoxical. Echos of a revisited surrealism? I don't think so. After all, the real world surpassed the surreal one a long time ago.

What these works suggest goes beyond it: strange is this world, our world. Transformed into an artifice, a synthesis, a simulation, it seems to be definitely in loop mode.

It is the artist's role (and not only the artist's) to tear, to cut, to open ways: to make hybrid, permeable universes of the natural and the artificial, the organic and the synthetic, the alive and the non-alive.

12. As a lotus flower (made of digits) being born and re-born on the skin.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "FF>>Dossier 004>>Gisela Motta e Leandro Lima". Disponível em: . São Paulo, julho de 2004.