Associação Cultural Videobrasil

4. In the contemporary sociopolitical and cultural context, local identities gain new configurations under stress with the global flows. Inserted into this process, electronic art participates as an open field to the experimentation and expression of new forms of subjectivity. How are these matters manifested in your work? 4. Our video work is distinguished by its interest in the experience of everyday life. Seen from our perspective, everyday experience has a form and character which often seems to fall outside the application of logic. Certain aspects of social and cultural meaning appear to defy reasoning or systematic attempts to unify that experience into something comprehensible. This situation is, as we see it, our backyard, the place where our poetic ideas and the ethos of our videos reside. The videos Two or Three Things I Know About Ohio and Standards reflect the current direction of our work. We attempt to work out a way of expressing, in video, what it feels like to be alive in this time and this place. We (Boord and Valdovino) come from different cultural backgrounds. Luis was born in Argentina and Dan was born in Oklahoma. We have different approaches to working but we share a similar predicament. Our works are often predicated on a so-called "insider's perspective," with each perspective in our work permeating a definite sense of place. Despite their many differences, there are some striking analogies between our birth places -- Bahia Blanca, Argentina and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Argentina and Oklahoma were both populated by indigenous peoples who were dislocated and extinguished. Both have oil and have their own versions of political populism. Oklahoma and Argentina share cowboys, gauchos and political scandals. As a result, the formulation of much of our video work can be attributed to methods of cross-cultural collaboration. In our works the duality of history/fiction, satire/tragedy, Argentina and the United States can become interchangeable and shed light to their intrinsic relationship. Over the last thirteen years we have been working on projects which have been emotionally and intellectually involved, either directly or indirectly, with autobiographical experiences involving how individuals fit within a larger culture. Such investigations are conducted through memory, time and observation. Much of everyday life is difficult to express in compelling visual terms, or emotionally and analytically. Significant features of everyday life seem invisible and irrational, and therefore not knowable. The fragmentary and idiosyncratic character of our experience is perhaps most clearly represented by American broadcast television, which has been characterized as "Charles Dickens on LSD." Information is piled upon information with little or no regard for context or sense. Programs on the Age of Gold coexist with "America's Most Wanted" and lucha libre (wrestling). These sort of associations sustain a well-developed sense of irony, and motivate us to observe that the best fiction is created in the world of everyday life and experience. The video Two or Three Things I Know about Ohio is a charming parody of travel documentary and a quick American satire that pays homage to the Great Lakes state of Ohio where we find the Amish, farms, small towns, an annual parade of twins from all over the world, a live bait dispenser machine that competes with Pepsi for your dollar, the Longaberger Company World Headquarters... Luis Buñuel wrote that cinema, "…seems to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious, the roots of which penetrate poetry so deeply." The same may be said for video. The tools of conceptual disjunction and association, the comparison and contrast of ideas, images, and sounds, provide the video artist with a link to the poetic motive. Poetic simile has a direct application to video.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil