Thesis | 2003

I

My thesis show consists of a slide show intended to establish a clear relationship between the architectural space of the gallery and the illusionary space introduced by the slides. The slides will present the viewer with images of interiors that in turn show images projected on to their walls. These images-within-the-image can be read as both windows or projections. Each slide will include a figure who acts as a character. The interiors will set the stage for an evolving interaction between this character and the projections within each image. The figure appears to be wandering through various spaces. Because the projected images can be read as windows, the slides will suggest that the actions of the character correspond to the nature of the fictional space created in each space. The resulting narrative will be enhanced through inter-titles that will be projected some of the slides. The inter-titles as well as the projections in the fictional spaces are all texts and images found in the New York Times. The slide show has the duration of one 80-slide carousel, that will change it’s slides in approximately two second intervals. The accompanying sound of the slide projector as it changes slides will be amplified by a megaphone. The thesis project is a response to the frustration of watching the recent war in Iraq on the news. Through new strategies in news coverage such as embedded reporters or live web-cameras the media is creating the illusion of a more realistic document, with the intent to give their audience the feeling of being informed, or almost being there. The heightened realism of the documentary footage nevertheless made my passive position as a viewer even more apparent and watching the bombs detonate over Baghdad in real-time left me feeling helpless and distanced from the event. In that respect the event was for me another manifestation of a more general feeling of alienation that has been the source of my work for some time.

II

A fictional conversation:

Brecht said:

“The situation is complicated because less than ever does a simple “replication of reality” say something about the reality. A photograph of the Krupps factory (…) yields practically nothing about the institution. The genuine reality has slipped into the functional. The objectification of human relations, as for example the factory, are no longer visible.”^[1]

Kluge answered:

“But more can be learned about the factory if two photographs are studied. Because of the relationship that develops between two shots, information is hidden in the cut which would not be contained in the shot itself. This means that montage has as its object something qualitatively quite different from raw material.”^[2]

“ Yes”

says Trinh Minh-ha.

“Truth lies in between all regimes of truth.”^[3] “And what persists between the meaning of something and its truth is the interval, a break without which meaning would be fixed and truth congealed”.^[4]

III

Film is fragmentary. It consists of still frames projected at a rate of 24 frames a second. Slide projections share the same structure as film. They area continuation of images, separated by a black line, or a black projection screen but their effect is very different. With film the illusion of a continuous movement is created only because of the speed at which the frames run through the projector. It is through the speed of the film and complex editing techniques that film pastes together our sensory experience. It gives us the illusion of reality through a continuously heightened sensory complexity as technology advances.

The process of slide projections draws the units of the montage to the viewer’s attention. Through what amounts to a slowed-down filmic process, the edges of the cut in film become visible again when the projection screen is empty. Gaps between images are not overcome. Furthermore, the changing of slides in the projector is a mirroring device to the physical act of taking a photograph. The sound of the projector as it changes the slides can be compared to the clicking of the shutter of a camera as it takes a picture. The projection apparatus therefore draws attention to the very source of the photographic image as a mechanical reproduction.

Projected slides retain their status as fragments, insisting on the integral meaning of the individual shot. The break, the cut, the dark projection screen is the interval that gives truth to the medium and the narrative.

IV

[Do] not supply the production apparatus without […] changing the apparatus”.^[5]

V

The break in between each image throws the viewer out of the continuity of the narrative, and forces him or her to re-orient with each new slide. The viewer is never allowed to be completely immersed in the story. This self-reflexivity or estrangement is important for the critique of the image that I would like to achieve in this work. Estrangement is the method Bertold Brecht used in his theater productions in order to break the tradition of theater, not through overthrowing its conventions, but rather through laying them to expose their manipulative qualities. It is precisely in the conventions that the ideologies of the bourgeois society which he wanted to critique were formed and manifested. Like Brecht, I want to use self-reflexivity and materiality in my work to charge it politically.

The slide projection in the gallery, as well as the images-within-the-image play an important part in the attempt to unravel the structures of the image. Because the projector literally throws back the light that has been captured by the camera before, the projection can be seen as the reversed mechanism of the very act of taking a photograph, and therefore references the mechanism of taking a photograph again. Like the figure in the slides, the viewer is exposed to the projections. The projection serves as a mirror to the viewer, making him or her aware of his or her position as a spectator.

VI

“I don’t have anything to say. Just something to point out.” ^[6]

VII

I would like to draw a connection here to Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades project” , which is a collection of information and observations that he gathered. It is a personalized history book, in which the banal is as important as world events. The book might be the result of the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction, through which a mass of information was produced that had to be dealt with. By leaving the reader without an explanatory or organizing voice, Benjamin questions the interpretational fictions provided by single linear history. The mass of descriptions, lists of names, scraps of information and quotations which comprise much of this historiography, attest to Benjamin’s refusal to channel a specific historical material into a simplified structure.

I am interested in the Arcades Project as a text that attempts to combine and synthesize already existing realities and information with personal stories in a way unique to the writer. It is an attempt to write a personalized version of history, one that might not appear in history books, but instead is an honest account of what the writer knows and experiences. Through combining found footage from the New York Times which is completely unrelated I am dealing with information in a similar way. The quoting of already existing realities in forms of images and texts is an attempt to understand the world news by repeating them or even simply by using them in my work. It is also an attempt to personalize the glut of information presented to me through the news without changing the documents themselves.

VIII

”True truths… are very difficult to obtain in history…. There are so many truths. Even the “truth” of many honest men will occasionally differ from my truth. All too often historical truth, so much implored and which everyone is eager to invoke, is only a word. It cannot exist even at the time it happens, in the heat of conflicting passions. And if, years later, there remains agreement it is only because the interests and the adversaries are no longer with us.

[…] There is probably no person who, according to his own way of perceiving things, does not attribute to my real system the fantastic result of his own calculations, and from that again comes the fable agreed upon that will be called history. It could not be otherwise."^[7]

IV

The narrative suggested by the slide projection is a fictitious montage of already existing realities. In Bertold Brecht’s production of Mother Courage the main character at one point walks in front of documentary footage of Stalin and Lenin. Her personal and fictitious narrative is opened up to a wider political context. By positioning documentary footage next to fictional, I am not only hoping to link the narrative to current political concerns, but also to pose the question of the reality value of the media in general. I am giving equal importance to both categories, to suggest on the one hand the reality of the narrative, but on the other hand also the construction of reality in the media’s documents.

Once taken out of the original context the images and the text from the New York Times become interchangeable and can serve a different meaning. Through creating a fictional narrative with found footage that is apparently objective, I want to show the way that documents are infiltrated by subjective interpretation.

X

The specific ideological questions regarding content and mediation discussed so far apply to my work in a more general way that has affected it over a long period of time. I can say that my work has always been an attempt to draw a map of the distance between me and my surroundings. In the process of mapping out this relationship, I am less concerned with the actual physical distance of my body to other objects and more with the distance of my position in and my understanding of the world to that of apparently everybody else.

My experience of alienation therefore is not only the cause but also the means for my art making process. Created through the desire to relate to a world, from which I see myself at the same time distinctively different, the mapping is a completely subjective process of making sense. In that process of making sense the distance between me and what I describe as the other, plays a crucial role. It is in exploring and understanding the difference that I am able to create meaning for myself. The gap between reality and fiction, the virtual and the actual, the image and the figure creates a mental space in which understanding becomes possible.