Associação Cultural Videobrasil

VB: 20 years_ "Against the consensus spectacle"

Against the consensus spectacle

This anniversary is certainly an important celebration. Since its origins Videobrasil exists as a forum in which the expressions of Brazilian, Latin American and Southern Hemisphere independent audiovisual production are the great panel that exhibits the creative potentiality of independent electronic audiovisual arts.

Taking into account the difficult context of this new millennium, the permanence of Videobrasil is a landmark in the world panorama in which the mass media prevail with their sale of consensus and spectacle. The video as a means, and ideology of the alternative and independent, was abandoned by known institutions which now are exclusively devoted to the propaganda of digital nature that still did not prove its power to produce great artistic works and is prominent for a lack of great authors and theoreticians.

The theme of independent audiovisual proposes a space and time in conflict, due to changes in the materiality of technological supports, to the pseudoglobalization of the audiovisual market and to the prevalence of digital equipment in all the production processes. Besides a support on the verge of disappearance, such as the electromagnetic, the nominative defense of video implies a clear ideological position which is beyond the support, since it defends the alternative, the authorial and the creative in the audiovisual field. The artistic work involving independent experimentation possesses an important value in a world dominated by few corporations that operate out of the ambit and the laws of decaying states. These organisms, fitting representatives of an empire recognized for the decaying level of its spectacles, have as their only model the economic benefit, the political submission and the global commercial control expressed by an audiovisual flow characterized by its uniformity. Offering alternatives to this magma is an essential mission in opposition to big events and the most important audiovisual festivals.

Influent personalities and the most prominent names, famous or unknown, of the world audiovisual creation passed by Videobrasil. This event has also gained repercussion as a forum of relations which meant encounters and contacts for authors from the whole planet. However, I think that the essence of Videobrasil existence and spirit was the national convocation it carried out. Videobrasil emerged devoted to Brazilian video, then immediately came to produce a very productive tension between the local circuit and the international one. In this alchemy it found its largest originality. Brazil, soon after the genesis which implied the Chilean movement in the continent, was a pioneer in the development of independent video and currently is the nation with a larger number of interesting audiovisual artists and producers. During the 1980’s, the will to do and the possibility of access to portable video equipment produced an appearance of authors and production companies, particularly in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. From the typical artistic search of São Paulo, always looking for an individual expression channel, to the undertakings of independent production companies for television, to video groups that pointed out a social and political action, video made history in Brazilian audiovisual field. Another essential characteristic of Videobrasil was that it opened space to all these Brazilian manifestations, in spite of intolerant criticisms by some purists of audiovisual art. The confluence of video artists and authors of TV products with popular video works centralized in the Associação Brasileira de Vídeo Popular (ABVP), or in pirate televisions indicated these characteristics of change and openness. In this way and also through the selection of all Videobrasil editions and its national and international diffusing activities, it is practically one of the few possibilities for a comprehensive vision of Brazilian video. Few institutions in the nation can offer something similar. The problematic institutional situation in our nations, on the periphery of the globalized world, complicates the maintenance of any audiovisual cultural and artistic collection, and this is even more complex when the material is independent. Videobrasil collection is almost certainly the most complete on the subject in Brazil, or at least in Latin America. This archive has an incalculable value and its preservation is imperative.

Those young videomakers who showed up in the first Videobrasil editions soon made incursions in the TV ambit, others adopted more profitable and less independent activities, but gradually contaminated various institutions in the system, beginning with a difference in criteria that implied a renewal of the documental and other TV formats, as well as of corporate, institutional and musical videos. This diversity and mix of energies generated a profuse quantity of video works created by artists and authors who found their place in the specification of every means and in the hybridism of their combinations, among which we can easily mention over ten authors who we consider that have marked a creation route and a unique period of remarkable works in the world ambit. The event Videobrasil was one of the institutions in charge of convoking and promoting them.

It’s worth remembering that today, more than ever, as the audiovisual market is more impenetrable, monopolistic and cunning, many schools, centres and universities in the whole world launch thousands of students in the market and they end up producing a certain kind of uniform audiovisual product. We think that independent institutions devoted to the audiovisual field are the ones which have the mission to form audiovisual artists, communicators and authors to generate a theory and motivate an experimental practice with the whole range of audiovisual languages, forms, supports and their combination. Diversity is the arm to face the uniformity in the training, provided by means which have adjusted to the situation of an audiovisual market that only conceives products according established parameters. Brazil is also prominent in this sense due to a line of thinkers, professors and theoreticians whose task is to generate an open and experimental practice to audiovisual forms. Perhaps this confluence is among other causes of the change and the high level of Brazilian independent audiovisual which is convoked in the consecutive Videobrasil editions.

There can be no great expectations for multimedia corporations, overconcentrated in few head offices with huge financial power and planetary range, regarding the creation of high quality audiovisual products, with an authorial mark of experimental nature and artistic purposes and uses. This is obviously a political issue which will never be changed by present statesmen. Therefore, organizations and events such as Videobrasil are an exemplary assurance of how to generate other spaces for a valuable, original and diverse audiovisual expression.

(catalogue 14th Videobrasil) ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp. 273 and 274, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.

essay_ Gustavo Galuppo_ "About the Work of Gustavo Galuppo: History(ies) of Digital Video"- by Jorge La Ferla

About the Work of Gustavo Galuppo: History(ies) of Digital Video

Gustavo Galuppo is one of the most original video artists of his generation in Argentina. Galuppo has produced a versatile work in search of his own style through a process of thought that is located between cinema, video, and digital art, questioning the expressive patterns of short and feature works. This video maker from Rosario, a video and cinema lover, has also begun to work in the field of installations and performances with his group Vera Baxter.

I would like also to mention this series, the Dossier, which is already an important organ within the international audiovisual panorama, enriching Videobrasil's memorable history. These chronicles are helping to preserve the Brazilian and international video-graphic heritage. The energy and continuity of the Festival, this Dossier, and the ambitious project of constructing an on-line database are some of the reasons why Videobrasil is so important as an organization within the world of video art. Videobrasil's vitality during this time of crisis correlates to the work and attitude of Gustavo Galuppo, who has been producing a solid audiovisual work without interruptions.

I have considered some aspects of Galuppo's last work, which may be useful for an analysis of his work as a whole. Thus, I have found short and long videos which establish a dialogue with many contemporary aesthetic trends.

The use of the concept of short subject movies in video is an interesting idea. This is not only an issue of duration, but also a semiotic contamination within the framework of electronic and digital technologies which reaffirm certain hybrid relations between cinema, video, and multimedia arts. The creative manipulation of these transfers between different supports and languages has produced a great turn in Galuppo's last works: “El ticket que explotó”, 5´, 2002; “La disección de una mujer ahogada”, 60´, 2002; “Días enteros bajo las piedras”, 65´, 2004; “La progresión de las catástrofes”, 8´50´´, 2004. These works alone constitute an interesting corpus.

In his long videos, there are some narrative devices forming a complex experimental narrative that we could maybe relate to the elegiac, anthological cinematic attempt in “Intriguing People” (1995), first feature by Eder Santos. In Galuppo's first long video, “Disección de una mujer ahogada”, Timoka, an undefined location, functions as an audiovisual panoptic terrain which is kept under rigid regime of control and isolation, where stories of disaffection and isolation take place. The protagonist's notes are part of a more extended enunciation in which his non-linear visual memory constructs a story of losses. In “Días enteros bajo las piedras”, an electronic, hybrid space with chromatic textures is constructed, a location where Clara Vogler and Nataniel are kept prisoners, wandering around and waiting for the inevitable death. This electronic, digital space is a fictitious location where the characters have tactile experiences that function as fragments of a complex narrative which is constructed of intertextual interferences through the manipulation of appropriated movie images and fragments of personal archives.

“Disección de una mujer ahogada” is a work which delineates the most complex plot, for it, at the same time, presents and breaks with the logics of traditional fiction, recycling certain mythical themes which are the same that crush the female character in its relation to love, death and incommunicability. This amorous, narrative search exposes an apparently hopeful romantic discourse, which results in a utopia, even for its creator. The images in this video were taken from domestic, home videos and fragments of silent films, and carefully joined during the fundamental process of post-production. “Disección de una mujer ahogada” and “La progresión de las catástrofes” were freely based on texts by J.L. Godard and Marguerite Duras. They propose complex intertexts between cinema and video, in which, through digital manipulation, the cinematic mythology is absorbed and recycled, resulting in something that could be called History(ies) of Cinema Through Digital Video.

The complex, interesting issue of video digitalization marks a work (Galuppo's) which is structured around the hybridism of technological supports and languages, through an original semiotic manipulation of cinema and video, emphasizing expressive constructions that relate to the history of these audiovisual devices and its mythologies.

Thus, Gustavo Galuppo, one of the most assiduous Argentine video makers, produces extraordinary expressive works which establish dialogues between themselves through the manipulation of images. On the one hand, there are “the brief poetics, conceptual, reflective works”, says Galuppo, “on the other, there are the long ones, in which the narrative tries hard to make way through solid structures. I don't know where they come from (and I do not want to know, I'd rather explore them and find their ways), but now I'm trying to take and explore both directions. Maybe that is just like this, two independent forms. Or maybe they join somewhere, generating a third form. We will see.”

G.G.

(…)

If that is the question, to explore one or both directions, you are doing fine. Anyway, you are in the middle of a long, hard, painful trip.

It is through this persistent search that you become an author.

You are doing fine, but there is always a need to get deeper into this. I believe that the narrative elements of your long works are something new, of great importance to the genre, and that your conceptual re-reading of cinema and memory is being very well conducted.

You still need to sweat more blood. Something that is difficult in Argentina, because of the lack of support and patronage.

But do not worry, you have already made yourself useful.

Best wishes,

JLF

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "ff>>dossier 007>>Gustavo Galuppo". Available at: . São Paulo, October, 2004.

essay_ff>>dossier Marcello Mercado

The boundaries of machinic image

Jorge La Ferla and Anabel Márquez

Discussing the work of Marcello Mercado entails discussing the history of audiovisual creation in Latin America. The scope of his artistic oeuvre implies considering the processes that convulse the relations between screen/image/viewer, pleasure/consumption, diegesis/identification, which Mercado respects, even though he transgresses them. Mercado’s videos cross several boundaries of hypothetical speculation concerning machinic image. The illusion of reality and motion achieved through camera recording is displaced by Mercado’s technological poetics in his account of experimentation processes using image.

We remember the first videos by Mercado, through which we became acquainted with his work. The Torment Zone (1992) and Las nubes (1991) already showed signs of diversity in a working system based on still image. The engravings and drawings in the iconographic series of notes, newspapers, religious prints, and X-rays were processed through electronic effects, in real time, using a Sony V 5000 camera, with which an initial graphic depiction of the frame was created. The reformulation of symbols, the plastic manipulation of image was carried out using analogical postproduction equipment as much as the camera itself.

The equipment available in the early 1990s could only withstand a certain amount of layers and recordings, as image quality deteriorated rapidly. In Mercado, this limitation gave birth to an editing aesthetic, spatial and vertical, that resulted in the proposal of a complex frame. The Torment Zone was made using the old, traditional ¾-inch video format, the U-matic. Visually aggressive, it presented the transfiguration of that which we see and hear. Maximum originality had been achieved by means of the process of estrangement, on the road from figurative to disfigurative, through resorting to the haptic vision; an abstraction that converted itself into the acute reading of a perverse Argentina, a feat achieved by but a few audiovisual works in the fatidic 1990s.

The Warm Place (1998) marked the beginning of Mercado’s work using a PC, in a private sphere, no longer resorting to a postproduction studio. M.M. became the operator who works alone on his own machine for long periods of time. At that time, certain complex commands in image manipulation took huge amounts of time in order to perform the calculations required for the composition, the so-called rendering. The Warm Place is an intense, visceral document that carried on with his quest based on pictorial hybridism in the electronic realm, albeit through mathematical/digital processes of manipulation.

In his work with analogical video, Mercado had already surpassed the boundaries of a technology devised for other corporate and artistic purposes. The disruption of the figurative aspect was based on the absence of typical scenes with characters within the frame, and on not resorting to moving images captured by the camera. The processing of archival footage, graphic drawings, and the combination of superimposed images shatter the conventions of literal association between sound and image.

Thus, The Warm Place hinted at another point of inflexion in Mercado’s oeuvre, namely the creative combination of video and multimedia, which exacerbates the frame’s composition structure, avoiding the transition, by cutting, between images. Nevertheless, we are always operating in two dimensions, within the frame metamorphosed by various software programs, which create a very broad variety of covers in the horizontal and vertical axes.

These processes may be interpreted as a metadiscourse on the use of certain hardware and software, which becomes a basic element for Mercado from this moment onwards. The artistic manipulation of such devices sets parameters for the expressive processes of images that convert any realistic dynamic optical image, be it recorded by a camera or archival, into its “deanalogized” form. These trajectories across the body, death, history, desire, and insanity are built up over the course of a long work in progress that breaks the linearity of habitual space-time relations.

These transitions question the notions of cutting, editing, and montage, thus subverting the commandments of classic audiovisual. In that way, more complex relations between the parties are proposed, as they transcend the frame and scene as units of meaning. This system of vertical image composition functions as a montage within the frame, creating a space comprised of various images resulting from algorithmic manipulation. It is by means of this endless manipulation that the work’s final form is defined. A temporary formality, because, to Mercado, audiovisual numeric operations are never over with, they are steps in his lengthy works in progress.

The old concept of editing is reconverted into a process that has no end. We are facing a new concept of mise-en-scène that breaks away from the notion of original work and master. The parameter of field depth, which had its genesis in a camera recording, is also modified through a process of artificial re-composition of the plans, based on their combination into layers, and the disruption of an analogical optical perspective. Despite its two-dimensional appearance, The Warm Place is a work in relief resulting from the vertical composition aesthetic described above. Mercado appropriates himself, phagocytizes, and transforms the uses of machines. At first, it was the video machine; now it is the PC. Let us remind that The Warm Place won the 12th International Electronic Art Festival Videobrasil, another important milestone in his artistic career.

Das Kapital (2004) arose out of processing by high-level digital machines and highly sophisticated software. This is another instance of technology, featuring equipment that processes complex image commands in real time. The reference to the work of Marx introduces a different form based on the association between the computer, text simulation processes, and the mathematical purity of a discourse about the world, political economy, the unconscious, and the epiphany of image.

A significant share of Das Kapital’s seventeen minutes is comprised of computer-generated images. It is a series of pure abstraction, combining text, formulas, and photographs, towards the end, of utter rawness, without any type of manipulation. There are pictures of dead bodies, bodies lacerated by violent action; the realism of death as the inertia of time past. Mercado uses the perennial photographic image as witness to the living, the motionless bodies culminate with an entire series of nonfigurative numeric images. This counterpoint is the effect of the work’s structure, in its mix of supports combining photochemical and numeric aspects, as a statement on what an artist can do by operating with technologies and linking together various visual devices.

With The Chemical and Physical Perception in the Eye of the Cat, in the Moment of the Cut (2005), awarded at the 16th Videobrasil, we begin to wrap up this brief overview of Marcello Mercado’s work. A video that features the emergence of electronic arts as a viable path for developing new experimentations, ones that appropriate themselves of the chemical and biological industry. Using three- and two-dimensional animation, stemming from the transposition of the pictorial practice into the computer, Mercado emulates biological decomposition processes by disrupting the index and operating the numeric image to the maximum.

The transformation of codes translated by the computer into synthetic images points to a new audiovisual language, revealing, by default, the two streams that constitute the essence of image: the analogy with what is real and the illusion of motion. In these works, the unsaid, such as text, graphics, and sound, is combined with the unrepresented, as a referential resulting from the manipulation of the electronic/digital device. This denying of traces of reality in the audiovisual, photochemical, electronic, and digital is among the outstanding features of Mercado, and it is present in the whole of his work.

The exception is represented by the image of the box of aspirins and the picture of the dead body with a bullet hole to its temple. Two analogies of brain malfunction. The careful, handicraft construction of multiple graphic fragments which, as time passes, constitute the parts of a whole, in a process of escaping the figurative that comes to being in the construction of the work and which, based on abstract aspects, creates a deep departure from the forms contained in representation systems. Mercado’s oeuvre bears witness to certain extremes in discourse and expression that video has been able to arrive at. It is in this function of art that one forces the audiovisual device into doing that which is not part of its program or representation system, i.e., an action that conquers new spaces of creative independence, a value that has lost its worth in contemporary audiovisual.

AAssociação Cultural Videobrasil. "FF>>DOSSIER 039 Marcello Mercado". Available at:http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/videobrasil/site/dossier039/ensaio_en.asp São Paulo, October 2008.