Presentation text 2005
Sound Waves for Selected Landscapes
The lines and pixels that comprise digital representations of the world are the basis for the new and unpredictable forms created by Angela Detanico (Caxias do Sul, 1974) and Rafael Lain (Caxias do Sul, 1973) in such works as Flatland – for which they won the prestigious Nam June Paik Award in 2004. In a view of the Mekong River transformed into a succession of horizontal lines, the work subtracts figurative representations from the image in order to heighten the senses of the viewer. In the performance to be presented at the Festival, the artists use images from a correlated series entitled Sound Waves for Selected Landscapes. A piece of video and photography, which nonetheless alludes to painting, these images transport the viewer onto an altogether different landscape: the interior. “We chose figurative images that were close to a concrete experience of the world; however, by presenting them in pixels, in black and white, we emphasized the digital representation in them”, explains Angela Detanico. “The interest here is to understand how the representation constructs images of the world and, ultimately, the world itself.”
The images are part of the same series of landscapes that the duo took as their basis in 2003 in creating the visual identity of the 14th Videobrasil, in 2003. They are also related to the set of world maps they exhibited at the Bienal de São Paulo in 2004, (O Mundo) Justificado, Alinhado à Esquerda, Centralizado,Alinhado à Direita. Now projected and under the effects of animation, they suggest at once immobility and movement: as in a fixed landscape that is manipulated,points emerge and lines circulate,while the sound, effected in distinct modulations,suggests the same. “What interests us is lived time,which isn’t linear, which really can be paradoxical, which is capable of smoothing vast extensions into short memories or extending the impact of instants into key moments in a life”, says Angela. “In Sound Waves for Selected Landscapes, the paradox between the frozen moment and the looping movement creates a kind of eternal instant, a time that resolves itself in itself, a moment of suspension.”
The reality dictated from within – regardless of the compass, clock,map or calendar officially in use – is what matters to the artists. Living between Paris and São Paulo, she a linguist and semiologist and he, a typographer. What interests the two is the structure of the digital image, the procedures of manipulation, the nature of representation and the spasm of time. In an article published in the Canadian contemporary art magazine “Parachute”, the curator Lisette Lagnado underscores the complexity and the hybridism of the procedures they use – which “could just as well make use of a rudimentary skill as a state-of-the-art technology”.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival - 'Performance.'": 6th to 25th September 2005, pp. 116 and 117, São Paulo, Brazil, 2005.