Invited curator |

Each Competitive Show juror drafted one curated proposal. Peter Callas selected eight of his own pieces. In the video series titled Technology as territory, Callas redesigns captured footage using a graphic computing system (Fairlight CVI and CVI Plus). Each separate image is part of a bigger mosaic, reflecting his view of the urban settings out of which he works: Tokyo, Sydney and New York. Not by chance, the featured pieces address the cultures of the three countries in which these cities are located. One can detect recurrent subjects throughout his work, such as multicultural and transcultural identity, history and collective memory.

artists

Works

Critical text Peter Callas, 1992

Images as Ideas

"Language is capable of speaking about things that are not", whereas "in the photograph we are looking at something that has been and is not there anymore". This is the fundamental difference between photography and language pointed out by Italo Calvino. Callas is interested in the zone between these two activities.

In the series of videos under the title of Technology as Territory, Callas redraws captured images using a computer graphics sysytem (Fairlight CVI and CVI plus). Each selected image as a fragment of a larger mosaic which represents his observation of an urban environment in which he is working at the time (Tokyo, Sydney, New York).

Firstly the image is extracted from its original environment and approached as a sign. It is trated and animated as a field of energy using a method of hand painting from a palette of cycling colors in the software.

Secondly each finish image is "destructured" on a two dimensional plane to create a pattern which relates to another form of energy suggested by the image. Some of these patterns are creted by obssessively repeating certain part of an image; others by transforming its simmetry. These patterns subsequently are used as points of "interruption" in the editing process. The energy of video does not result so much of the imagistic content of each scene as it does from the interruption (or edit points) in these scenes.

Finally the image is created as a "cut-out" to be applyed to a number of different backgrounds, fed by two or three additional CVI computers. The production most critical stage before the on line editing is choosing foregrounds and backgrounds. Each "cut-out" is recalled into one of three CVI's connected so that what is in the backgroud can became the "foreground", and vice-versa.

This is an intuitive process. This is the essence or "writing' of the work. Previously, there exists no script or storyboard. Computer graphics devices free the artists from having to use a viewfinder as a framing device and brings the at of writing in the sense that. In writing, we make associations and references with lighting speed in the creation, for example, of metaphor.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "9th Videobrasil International Festival": 21st to 27th September 1992, pp.68, São Paulo, Brazil, 1992.