Associação Cultural Videobrasil

There are no stones in the pathway. 
An insect moves on (legs and antennas) near some sidewalk curb. 
In the pathway there are no stones, 
and the insect does not reach its destination. It just moves on 
(combined(1) with images of Belo Horizonte) near the curb. 
It moves on and fades away amidst images of Minas Gerais’ capital city, images that 
(growingly opaque) fill up the screen. 
— Not even an insect this size can escape the grip of the city that paralyzes it with its sluggish concreteness?

The buildings fade away and reveal no stones in the pathway, as an insect moves on (legs and antennas) near some sidewalk curb. 
In the pathway there are no stones, and the insect does not reach its destination. 
It moves on (electric wires and posts in the background). 
Once again, it moves on and fades away, this time underneath electric wires and posts which (growingly opaque) fill up the screen. 
— How can it move freely along the urban network (graphic landscape facing this loquacious main character) that insists on taking it back to the starting point?

Wires and posts fade away and reveal no stones in the pathway. 
An insect moves on. Legs not cars (dislocations), antennas not TV (transmission).

The feitoamãos project, based in Minas Gerais, seeks to research, produce, and reflect upon language and the possibilities of electronic art, by means of work to be exhibited in VCRs, DVDs, or computers. The group also presents itself under the name *//FAQ, a project for live image and audio manipulation and execution. 

Close-up on the insect who moves on in a loop, as if it were upon a carpet that is pulled back before it reaches its destination; such was the theme of BHZ—a presentation that was featured at Casa do Conde (Belo Horizonte) during the Laboratório Eletronika 2004—as well as the theme for the first section of Trânsito [Traffic]—a presentation that was featured at the Centro Cultural Telemar (RJ) during prog:ME (http://www.progme.org/), Rio de Janeiro’s first international new media festival.

*//FAQ’s presentations travel through the realm of alternative pop music. Electric guitars, combined with electronic elements and subtle percussion, generate friction between old and new. By the way, this duality—Baroque once again—is part of the group’s name itself, a combination of craftsmanship [‘feitoamãos’ – handmade] with digital culture practices (‘FAQ’ is an acronym for ‘Frequently Asked Questions,’ a common page in big websites).(2)

The Italian stage, typical of this form of expression, yields artwork which seldom addresses the problem of space in all of its complexity, although the videos’ main theme is space, as they attempt to break up the unity of the screen (and of the cinematic perspective). 

Out of all the group’s projects, É (in)possível estar em 2 lugares ao mesmo tempo[It Is [In]possible to Be in 2 Places at the Same Time] is the only one which adopts that same strategy with regard to the occupation of the space where it is exhibited, exploring the tension between the physical and mediated presence of musicians and video artists, through the use of presence and light sensors. 

In Trânsito, the use of two simultaneous screens, one in the back area of the stage and another in the front, generates a small delay from one screen to the other, dilating the inevitable temporality of the projection over a single surface.(3) The first screen is made of a dark, grainy fabric, creating a diffuse effect that turns musicians and video artists onstage into a kind of human chroma set against video sequences. Nevertheless, all of this only makes the situation more sophisticated, but does not dissolve the space as eloquently as in É (in)possível.

*//FAQ’s field of work gathers together various forms of expression—which are not always obvious, as is the case with performances and interactive installations. Pieces such as É (in)possível estar em 2 lugares ao mesmo tempo are the ones that best articulate the diverse possibilities suggested by recent experiments with real-time image and video manipulation and execution, as they articulate all of those domains. This is a rare feature. Most live image and audio pieces restrict themselves to the format of contemplative presentation, be it in improvisations, by VJ’s in nightclubs, or the more elaborate exhibitions in museums and galleries.

*//FAQ makes heavy use of video, probably due to the fact that feitoamãos’ first projects were single-channel pieces, such as the widely acclaimed 5—a fragmentary  exploration of the five senses with an uneven end result—, or streaming pieces, such as 7 maravilhas [Seven Wonders]. 7 maravilhas is a collection of loops, featuring Dona Inês Maravilha[Mrs. Inês Wonder] and Canivete Suíço[Swiss Knife], which use heavily graphic images—a solution that is also used in the group’s live presentations—, and short, nonnarrative videos such as Fio Maravilha, Cidade Maravilhas [Wonders City], and Stevie Wonders.

When animated or flicked, fixed images yield a type of incrustation that is typical of contemporary videos. They do not require chroma key, since the same effect can be attained by inserting images containing transparent cuts, using software such as After Effects. Moreover, the technique is similar to the logic of so-called early cinema, using stationary images as a starting point for the creation of visual entertainment. Improvisation based on these small fragments gives rise to longer (thematic) courses.

Since some of this material is captured from the Internet, it is more reminiscent of specific imagery (situationism, tactical media, femmes fatales, graffiti, displacements) than of a concern with an established audiovisual aesthetic. Curiously enough, video, which was long considered as low-resolution image compared with cinema image, nowadays has a superior visual quality to that of computer- and cell-phone-produced images, which are increasingly common in the visual culture of our times. 
Presently, video image is no longer deemed sparse, since it has become denser (to the point of reaching movie screens) in a visual culture of not too many megabytes.

In the case of feitoamãos, the use of graphism and pixelized digital images contrasts with the saturated graininess of video sequences; a good example is the initial sequence of Matéria dos sonhos[Dream Matter]. Two hands are superimposed, one of them graphic and stationary, the other one, videographic and anxious in its accelerated motion. Discrete black tones over lots of red combine two different types of visual textures, obtained through conflicting images of different thicknesses. Is this still Baroque? 

shortcut #1: two Macintosh computers and one switcher produce layers of images organized according to distributed scores. 
The presentations of *//FAQ are visual flickings of a database that yield a kind of synesthetic jazzistic motion. The closeness with a database-like cinema is programmatic: one of *//FAQ’s first live presentations was Dziga Vertov reenquadrado [Dziga Vertov Reframed]. According to Lev Manovich, Vertov’sMan with a Movie Camera anticipated the possibility of a database-like, paradigm-oriented cinema that defies the temporal narrative flow of the love stories that Hollywood insists on delivering to the world. 

comeback: 
The repeated beauty of those prosaic insect gestures cannot hide the absence of a clearly-defined destination, as it leads from nothing to nowhere. Two doses of Kafka and one dose of energy drink. In Trânsito, the sequence acquires new meaning within the context of Deleuze’s intensities, altering the orientation of this unceasing motion. These images and their physical quality relate to each other, searching for their own “state of things.”

As in the myth of Sisyphus, where the hero is condemned to the absurd task of pushing a rock to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back down, which makes him push it up the hill again and so forth, ad infinitum. The cyclic punishment of the suicidal hero was the first loop in a history of thought that gains new meaning, as digital technologies modify contemporary forms of expression.

shortcut #2: the use of text is abundant in the work of feitoamãos/F.A.Q. Most texts are not supposed to be read, since the images do the narration, while the text simply illustrates. The work of *//FAQ features a kind of writing that formulates thoughts through complex strategies that combine text, image, and audio.

The eternal comeback: There are no stones in the pathway. 
An insect moves on...

(1) In Por uma estética da imagem vídeo [For an Aesthetic of Video Image], Philippe Dubois discusses some aesthetic parameters which “emerge with intensity in video practices,” remarking that “the first strong feature that arises is the mixing of images.” In Dubois’ opinion, there are three “major procedures with respect to that: superimposition (of multiple layers), games using windows (in different configurations), and, above all, incrustation (aka “chroma key”),” cf. Philippe Dubois, Godard. Cinema. Vídeo, São Paulo, CosacNaif, 2004, pp 77-8. Of the forms proposed by the French philosopher, the first and the third ones are more commonly featured in the artwork of feitoamãos/F.A.Q., Baroque in its abundance of layer upon layer, especially in some of their live presentations, in which they use two Macintosh computers to bombard images onto the switcher that controls the way those images are projected. 

(2) The concept of digital craftsmanship is widely used by Richard Brabook, as explained on NeMe: FAQ Digital Work 
(http://neme.org/main/103/faq-digital-work) and on The Digital Artisans Manifesto 
(http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-digitalartisansmanifesto1.html). 

(3) For Lev Manovich, “visual culture and modern art provide many ideas of how a space narrative can unfold in a computer,” be it by using simultaneous windows, by creating synchronized events, or by exploring the effects of superimposition. According to Manovich, spatial arrangement is one of the features that enable one to distinguish between digital language and its analogical predecessors. With respect to live image and audio presentations, this spatial arrangement takes place when the stage & audience format is abandoned. Cf. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 2000, p. 321. A longer discussion on spatial arrangement can be found in 6 propostas para os próximos minutos [Six Proposals for the Following Minutes] (http://netart.incubadora.fapesp.br). In VJ em cena: o espaço como partitura audiovisual [VJ in Action: Space as an Audiovisual Score], Patrícia Moran addresses similar issues, approaching theoretical topics and analyzing examples of real-time image and audio manipulation.