Associação Cultural Videobrasil

“Risks of the Present Time” - by André Brasil, Christine Mello and Eduardo de Jesus

Risks of the Present Time

André Brasil, Christine Mello and Eduardo de Jesus

Poetry is risk. The famous poem-synthesis, proclaimed in a number of different supports by Augusto de Campos, reverberates strangely and inversely in Andrew Grove's(1) half-mystical, half-entrepreneurial formula: “only the paranoid survive”. For Intel's Chairman of the Board, in a society characterized by risk and instability, we must all feel constantly threatened. In the light of Grove's cynical lucidity, the immediate conclusion is that contemporary capitalism, quite apart from its furthering of exclusion and economic disparities, operates perversely in the realm of subjectivities: we are urged to take a stance against everything and against everybody, as part of a risky individualistic competitive strategy.

Whatever we call it - the society of risk, uncertainty or instability - contemporary experience is fragile: we are living on a tightrope, in a precarious balance between the prospect of finally enjoying, once and for all, the vaunted advances of techno-science, and the prospect - touted in the media and in scientific discourse - of the end itself (of history, of art, of science, of philosophy, of mankind, of life).

Above all else, risk is a rhetoric (which does not mean that it is not real or that it does not interfere in a very concrete way in our lives). Risk becomes reality when it has already become a catastrophe or a damage. In order to remain a risk it must stay latent, imminent, about to happen. That is why risk is always on the edge of discourse, on its boundaries.

The media seems to be one of the major sources of the discourse on risk today: in the media we are always on the brink of an environmental catastrophe, of a nuclear war, a terrorist attack, about to be infected by an incurable virus, to lose our jobs, to have our homes burgled, or to undergo an economic crisis. Increasingly present in our daily lives, and in its sheer media visibility, the discourse of risk eventually legitimizes control. In the face of the looming risk, we demand more and more security, more and more policing, more and more surveillance, more and more control. As Giorgio Agamben(2) suggests, instability legitimizes the transformation of political power into police power.

This means that contemporary experience stems from a contradictory desire: invited to become the entrepreneurs of our own selves, urged to tap into information, entertainment and consumption networks, we must constantly run risks, but - no, thank you very much - we do not wish to assume these risks. What immediately results from this contradiction is a sort of asepsis of experience: however, not without experience becoming first information, this new kind of communication that clarifies and explains everything.(3)

Asepsis of space, which becomes increasingly transparent, visible, mapped and monitored in its macro- and micro-physical dimensions. Asepsis of the body, which can be scanned and investigated by increasingly sophisticated optical instruments and, now that its operational code has been discovered, can be manipulated indefinitely.

But we are concerned mainly with time here. We know that the array of techniques developed in the field of communication and computing, biotechnology and genetic engineering, are changing our experience of time, which seems to be increasingly driven by ideas of predictability and forecasting.

Through increasingly sophisticated simulation techniques, used in a bewildering variety of fields - from genetics to finance - we have made the unforeseen predictable, we have translated the possible into measurable, calculable and pre-testable information. If, as Bellour writes, “time constructs the image by devouring it like a cigarette burning down”(4), the film is now playing backwards: it is the image - plastic, dynamic and processual - that consumes time, in its eagerness to anticipate it.

Chance, the unforeseen, that which is still coming to light: what the future represents in terms of risk, virtuality or the irreducible difference from the present, can now be monitored and controlled by means of every kind of preventive and modeling technique. In other words, to reduce what is “risky” in experience we must hedge ourselves around by more and more information, making our daily existence increasingly in-formed. As Jean-Louis Comolli(5) would say, we live increasingly scripted lives, protected from the “risk of the real”.

Within this context the electronic and digital image has an ambiguous status. On the one hand, having been made information, it can be part of surveillance and modeling devices, increasing the transparency of space and the predictability of the climate. On the other hand, taken over by contemporary artistic and political strategies, it can reinvent spaces of uncontrol and once again leave the future wide open to risk. Only that it is now a new type of risk, the risk of esthetic experience, that risk capable of reconfiguring our field of possibilities, of expanding our horizons of expectations and the scope of what we deem “thinkable”.

Electronic risks

In its extreme instability - “dust in one's eyes”, as Fargier(6) so aptly puts it - the electronic image is inserted historically and semiotically into the several artistic and communicational fields, infiltrating, opening up pathways between one and the other, transforming them and being transformed by them. Today, more than ever before, electronic production is undergoing expressive proliferation, creating impure, unpredictable forms: forms that for this very reason do not fit snugly into generic classifications. This all helps make the field of electronic production a risk zone, a space of tension between cultural strata and languages.

This production is also expansive. Electronic images - analogical or digital - go beyond the limits of the screen, redesigning urban and domestic spaces, sheltering and changing subjectivities. If, as Philippe Dubois(7) puts it, we are living in a sort of “video-state”, this is because contemporary experience, from television to security cameras, is more and more intensely mediated and reconfigured by the range of electronic devices that are working ubiquitously and instantaneously. The electronic image thus becomes a state of the image and of reality itself: it is through it that other images and our own presence in the world are processed and conceived of.

However, beyond its expansive and permeable nature, the electronic image must be deemed risky owing mainly to its event-like dimension. This dimension can be investigated in several ways. One has to do with the particular means by which the electronic image operates the inscription of time: its temporal dimension and its processual character make it a true electronic event. As Arlindo Machado states, the videographic framework does not exist in space, but only in the duration of a sweep across the screen. Electronic images, he goes on to say, “are no longer the expressions of a geometry, but rather of a geology, in other words, of an inscription of time on space. Time is thus no longer what it was in the cinema, that which comes between one frame and the next, but that which is inscribed in the unfolding of the sweeping lines and superimposition in the frame”(8). An electronic event, therefore, which weaves itself in processual fashion, at the very moment when the image forms upon the screen. The risk of the image that permeates and is permeated by the risk of experience.

There is another way of thinking about the event-like status of the electronic image. Less as the slicing of an instant than as the uninterrupted flow of light signals, the electronic image is processed in real time and often enables a coincidence between the moment when the image is produced and when it is shown. Real time allied to telepresence makes ours a live society, continually being overlaid, in an expanded present of several spaces and temporalities. We might critically add, with Virilio(9), that images transmitted instantaneously and at a distance, enabled by electronic and digital technologies, dominate the thing shown, provoking a kind of accident, a short circuit between presence and distance. It is thus a “paradoxical era of images”(10).

Despite all the political and esthetic ambiguities created by this paradox, the openness to real time and to the ceaseless flow of the present also opens up the image to the event in its unpredictable emerging. The contingency of its capture and its instantaneous circulation permeates the image with the random, with (quasi) events.

Beyond its merely technical or technological aspects, yet indissociable from them, the esthetic appropriation of the electronic image takes place in the context of its temporal, processual and event-like nature. An artist working with the electronic source material will mould and manipulate, or rather, modulate time itself. He or she can therefore expose the image to duration, to the event, to the risk of present time and all that this entails in terms of contingency and uncontrollableness.

Being open to duration the image can thus accommodate the possible. It can often even provoke it, as in certain documental or performative procedures that aim less to record than to produce an experience (which would not take place without the intervention of someone behind the camera producing it).

The event, “the unexpected of all expectation”, as Blanchot might put it, is that which can affect us and thus reconfigure or expand our field of possibilities: when it pierces the image in its unseizable appearing, the event can make us think what was previously unthinkable for us. This opens up a risky territory: “a placeless space and an unengendering time”(11), in which moves “a thought that does not yet think”(12). Ambiguous, precarious, unstable, the image installs itself within this risk zone, where discernment, decision, explanation and action are impossible. All that remains for us is “an effort, not to express that which we know, but to feel that which we do not know.”(13).

We can take up once more Augusto de Campos' famous poem that opened this essay: poetic risk in many ways differs from the risk which, through techno-scientific discourse or media discourse, leaves us in a state of constant alert, or constant paranoia. While the latter is increasingly used in order to legitimize control, invasion of privacy and war (infinite justice, some might say), it is the former that can overturn our certainties: it thus reinvents our horizon of expectations, our field of possibilities. It is less a case of foreseeing the future in order to colonize it, than of opening up as-yet unheard-of virtualities.

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(1) Apud Sibila, Paula. O homem pós-orgânico: corpo, subjetividade e tecnologias digitais. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2002.

(2) Agamben, Giorgio. Sobre a segurança e o terror. In: Cocco, G. & Hopstein, G. (org.). As multidões e o império: entre globalização da guerra e universalização dos direitos. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A Editora, 2002.

(3) Benjamin, Walter. Obras Escolhidas:

magia e técnica, arte e política. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994.

(4) Bellour, Raymond. Entre-imagens. Campinas: Papirus, 1997, p. 41.

(5) Comolli, Jean-Louis. Cinema contra espetáculo. In: FORUMDOC.BH.2001. Belo Horizonte, 2001.

(6) Fargier, Jean-Paul. Poeira nos olhos.

In: Parente, André (org.). Imagem Máquina. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1993.

(7) Dubois, Philippe. Cinema, Vídeo, Godard. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2004.

(8) Machado, Arlindo. Máquina e imaginário. O desafio das poéticas tecnológicas. São Paulo: Edusp, 1996, p. 52.

(9) Virilio, Paul. A imagem virtual mental e instrumental. In: Parente, A. (org.). Imagem Máquina. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1993.

(10) Idem.

(11) Blanchot, Maurice. O livro por vir. Lisboa: Relógio D'água, 1984, p. 88.

(12) Idem, p. 60.

(13) Blanchot, Maurice. À parte do fogo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1997.

BRASIL, André; JESUS, Eduardo de; MELLO, Christine. "Risks of the Present Time". In: Caderno Videobrasil. Associação Cultural Videobrasil, nº1, pp. 101-103, São Paulo, 2005.

essay_ Daniel Lisboa_"Political Image"

Political Image

Contemporary audiovisual production ebbs and flows through the most varied paths and possibilities of creation. The multiple processes of image building lay bare several vectors, lines of force and of continuity that somehow strengthen the bonds that tie together an audiovisual history-of-sorts (or a “Media Archaeology,” as Siegfried Zielinski puts it). The heritages of video art, of Cinema Novo [New Cinema], of the avant-gardes, and of the first video productions are often rearranged into new productions aimed at revealing the crooked paths of audiovisual devices and their maneuvers around reality's shards.

The videos of Daniel Lisboa lie somewhere along the lines of continuity that tie together, sometimes almost paradoxically, experimental images based on formalist principles and the restlessness of a political and anarchic view of social events, especially the political and social situation of Bahia. Lisboa seems to have inherited the M.O. of the technical apparatus used by the historical avant-gardes of the 1920s, or of the first video productions of the 60s, and the uneasiness of producers who soon thereafter migrated to the experimental and community TVs that characterized U.S. audiovisual output during the 70s. Lisboa's work seems to belong to both these lines, that often seem to exclude each other, as pointed out by Martha Rosler in her essay “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” published in the collection Illuminating Video* :

The attempt to use the premier vernacular and popular medium had several streams. The surrealist-inspired or influenced effort meant to develop a new poetry from this everyday "language" of television, to insert aesthetic pleasure into a mass form, and to provide the utopic glimpse afforded by "liberated" sensibilities. This was meant not merely as a hedonic-aesthetic respite from instrumental reality but as a liberating maneuver. Another stream was more interested in information than in poetry, less interested in spiritual transcendence but equally or more interested in social transformation. Its political dimension was arguably more collective, less visionary, in its effort to open up a space in which the voices of the voiceless might be articulated.

In the work of Lisboa, these two trends mix with each other in videos that, if on the one hand treat image formally, on the other hand reveal political and social issues. The highlight of this mix-reminiscent of Paul Garrin's videos, particularly Home(less) Is Where the Revolution Is (1990)-is precisely the use of formal procedures typical of experimental video, fused together with documentary elements, bringing forth a natural tension between image, its form, and the social contents presented. In the work of Daniel Lisboa, this feature is clearly present in U Olhu Du Povu, Freqüência Hanói, and in O Fim do Homem Cordial, a video that was awarded a prize at the 15th edition of Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival.

The long black-and-white sequence shot of ordinary people in the streets that lasts nearly the whole duration of U Olhu Du Povu reveals an interesting aesthetic approach. People are cut off from the background, which becomes a mere vestige, a thin reference of place. This image of the solarized background, with people standing in front of it, seems like a xerox copy of the real space, a worsened, unfaithful reconstruction, unable to reveal anything. Pure image construction. Thus, we are slowly lulled by the music of Chico Science (Coco Dub) and by images of perplexed people staring. The tension persists until the video's last minutes, when we realize that we are watching a demonstration of students, left-wing parties, and the general public in the streets of Salvador during the expelling process of Senator Antonio Carlos Magalhães, a central figure in the most conservative end of politics in the state of Bahia who was exonerated for tampering with an electronic voting panel. A statement by a woman at the end of the video collaborates to lend the images of the people a new meaning. Perplexity, passivity, and stupefaction; Lisboa managed to capture these feelings and to build an instigating narrative-of-sorts, that culminates with the revelation of the reason why people are so amazed.

In the disquieting Freqüência Hanói, codirected by Diego Lisboa, beautiful images of an intensely blue sky crisscrossed by electric wires, antennas, and other “urban gadgets” serve as counterpart for the candid discourse of an inmate (or is he?) as he tells his story, expresses his indignation and his dreams. Throughout the entire video, the inmate's voice is interrupted by static, radio-like sounds. The interesting thing is that the static also interferes with the image, which blacks out at times, revealing small fragments of images. We also see very quick flashes of a police district, and of graffiti. Tunings that meet each other in the angry political discourse of the inmate and in these images that cut through the blue sky. In this game between losing and finding the right tuning, Lisboa gives voice to those who usually can't reach the media.

The result is sheer potency, a revelation of the state of affairs, particularly regarding politics in Bahia and in Brazil. The images do not show the inmate, therefore they are not structured around a representation of reality, thus enabling the tuning possibilities of this “image-radio-voice” to reveal to us, in depth, a voice we are not so used to hearing. A voice that usually gets lost in the mainstream media.

If Freqüência Hanói provides some space to the inmate's voice, in O Fim do Homem Cordial the fiction that develops around a terrorist device reveals the marginal voice of the excluded. The video is comprised of images taken from the afternoon newscast of the most-watched Bahia TV station and, just like the terrorists of the Al-Qaeda Network, demands that the material they have sent to the TV station, about the abduction of a well-known senator from Bahia, be broadcast. What we see is brutal and seems to rub in our face the daze in which thousands of Brazilians live, constantly affected by the corruption of politicians. Upon turning video into a terrorist device (the image breaking into the TV schedule, the lack of camera motion, the violent discourse, the low-quality image, visual interferences of all kinds), Lisboa seems to subvert the location of the audiovisual, alluding to a reality that is built upon mediation, and of which image is already a part. Out of this subversive appropriation of images emerges the “not-so-cordial” discourse of those who usually have no voice. “Cabeça branca vai rolar” [White head will roll], shouts out the “terrorist from Bahia” as he fearlessly brandishes his knife for the camera. Lisboa delves deeper into the terrorist device, as he subtly switches the subtitles from English to Arabic, and includes an Arabic soundtrack at the end of the TV newscast. The strategy consists of using video as a device that violently fakes reality, covering it up with fiction to see how far its image shards go. This is a media short circuit, image as a vestige of actual media.

The work of Lisboa reveals, in a very blunt fashion, a trend in Brazilian audiovisual production that oscillates between formats and genres, using the current multiplicity of images to soak up possible situations of subversion, re-creation, and appropriation, such as, for example, television in its mediation (news, information, entertainment, numbness), in O Fim do Homem Cordial, or the tension between documentary, fiction, and experimentation, in Freqüência Hanói.

Moreover, the typical tensions of the meeting with the Other, revealed in the works, belong in a repertoire of strategies devised to involve us as spectators and to place different worldviews into conflict. The result is an impactful body of work that is intensely connected with social life, and capable of giving voice to the Other, thus laying bare in explicit fashion certain Brazilian political issues that are often left out from national newscasts.

*Doug Hall and Sally Fifer, Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (New Jersey: Aperture Foundation, 1990).

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "FF>>dossier>>017>>Daniel Lisboa". Available at: . São Paulo, April, 2006.

essay_ff>> dossier The Archive of Time

The Archive of Time

Eduardo de Jesus

The analysis of the archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us.

Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge)

The modes of archiving, the role played by the archive, as well as the powerful relations between archive and image, constitute some starting points for us to approach the work of the Argentine Nicolás Testoni. Initially, our focus was on the video Canto de aves pampeanas (2006), awarded at the latest edition of the International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil. Looking at other work by Testoni, however, similar procedures and the same confrontations with the field of documentary and the discourses of memory and their possible fabulations become clear.

That which, being outside ourselves, delimits us, as Foucault would have put it, provides a form to the archive and reveals a complex relation of otherness built with these sparkles of time that were retained and collected. In his videos, Testoni carries out that operation in the timing of memory. He ends up repositioning it in the present time, but leaves a series of blank spaces that gain meaning as the video goes on and which disclose, little by little, this form of organization typical of archives. However, at the same time he reveals its imponderable updating, by the sparkles of the real that affect and reconfigure the meanings of images.

We are surrounded by the present of those images, yet involved in a situation of archiving which both the narration and the intertitles, dividing the parts of each chant, show us. We go from the past of the lost film—of which only the recording of the singing of Pampa birds remain—to the invasion by the petrochemical industry. Testoni associates the images, long open shots with seemingly no events, with sound. We are guided by the singing of the birds.

(Regarding the singing of the birds, I confess that it reminds me of my own memories. My father raises birds as a hobby until this day. I spent a good share of my childhood and adolescence watching as my father sat, listened, and counted the chirps, the so-called “flutes” of each one of them. The sensation that I got, upon watching this video for the first time, was that of revisiting those situations in my memory, not through image, but rather through the sound. Listening to the singing, I remembered everything. An audio-oriented Proustian madeleine.)

The places where the film’s sound recordings were supposedly made are the locations in which Testoni chooses to frame up another time, a temporality typical of that archive that is at once close to us and different from our times. Perhaps that was the time when Pampa birds were able to sing without having to share the landscape with the petrochemical industry.

Testoni’s images are far removed from the Morel’s machine, to which Casares gave shape in his book. The Invention of Morel saved the images as if they were a life form accumulated in the past, distant from possible updates. In the island, far from everything, the fugitive, upon falling in love with the woman who watches the sunset everyday, does not even suspect that hers is an image that comes from the past, of someone who is not there, and will never again be. It is a sort of space-and-time projection, strangely incrusted in that space-time of the island. On the contrary, in Canto de aves pampeanas the archive is comprised not only of images of the past. In one single, ever-oscillating recording, the timing of birds, of the supposedly lost film, coexists with present-day images of those possible places. Everything is strangely real and current, because the proposed motion is a form of updating, paradoxically constructed as an archive, dynamically mixing past and present. Testoni shows us that the stability of the archive is updated by the nature of the images, by what they reveal as they become unstable in our perception.

The device built by Testoni for his video speaks of the archive, but also of its powerlessness. It is structured as a didactic audiovisual, clearly inspired by observation films, catalogs indexed and organized by bird type. However, the singing of birds, which frames up the field with the images at first, ends up casting us out of it when, little by little, in the three divisions that structure the video, we see more and more industries take up the space. At the end, along with the description of the chirp of each bird, the names of the industries appear, everything guided by the voice of the narrator that lists them. That which comes from outside the field, the singing of the birds (which are not shown up front as in didactic documentaries) ends up setting its boundaries, only for them to be disrupted soon thereafter. Failure in the archive. The supposed didactic character of the procedures used by Testoni takes up different shapes, retraces another path between past and present. It guards a time that seems to leak out of the images, especially due to the rigueur with which the director conducts the construction of this “fake” archive.

There is not any text to function as a subtitle to the images. Only at the end of the video is the singing associated with the places and what took place in them. Thus, they acquire the same dimension as that of local inhabitants and their everyday lives. Within that instability, the archive acquires new meanings, and actually ends up setting our limits, creating a certain present existence, a certain time that passes differently between past and present.

We can also perceive in this work a powerful tension surrounding the field of documentary, especially in the sense of expanding it to areas of passing and contamination by other domains. Perhaps that is one of the distinctive features of the experience of more contemporary documentary, which attempts to depart from the spectacle (in the Debordian sense of the term), from the idiosyncrasies of the characters and from preestablished situations. Some of those documentaries, in turn, seek that which is the most ordinary, most common, so that the voice of the “Other” looks different. Less spectacular and more open, these experiments point to places less standardized by the recurring stereotypes, and more prone to the invention of the subjects that see and those that allow themselves to be shown, including the directors themselves, as, for example, in Passaporte húngaro (2003), by Sandra Kogut, and 33 (2004), by Kiko Goifman, among others.

In other of his works, Testoni also lets this affiliation with contemporary documentary show through. It is clear in El puerto (2003-2006), a series of five short episodes. It features local characters, with nearly no “spectacular singularity,” who give accounts of their day-to-day experiences at the port of the city of Bahía Blanca (Argentina), where Testoni lives and works. The steady shots and little illustrative images disclose the unpredictable quality of their lives. According to Testoni, this project is structured as a series, in keeping with a concept from television, however it is designed to be passed from hand to hand, rather than broadcast through the configured channels. It is an open recording of memories, with no final or conclusive format to the images.

The aspects of memory also feature in the video S/T (White Noise, 2007), by Testoni and Ricardo De Armas. With a sophisticated editing of images taken from old super-8 homemade films and elaborate interruptions to the flow of images, the video lays bare the rhythm and frequency of memory. What we view seems to be a materialization of the modes of functioning of memory, of its flaws and constitutional defects, sequenced in fleeting situations of recollection and forgetfulness, similar to oscillations. The possible memories that the video seems to elicit, also within the framework of Bahía Blanca and the port of Ingeniero White, always feature empty spaces and repetitions, and are structured both in image and their absence in order to build meaning.

The work of Nicolás Testoni translates, in a contemporary form, some of the tensions of memory, of the modes of archiving, of the dilutions of audiovisual formats and genres, showing us some of the paths trodden by electronic image in our time, in its confrontations with social life.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "ff>>dossier 040>> Nicolás Testoni". Available at: . São Paulo, November, 2008.