Associação Cultural Videobrasil

essay_ Detanico Lain_ "If it does not seem to you this way, so it is" - by Giselle Beiguelman

IF IT DOES NOT SEEM TO YOU THIS WAY, SO IT IS

Turn the monitor round. (don't be afraid)

Forget the window. (any window)

Deny all the borders. (even the frames)

Ignore the phonetics. (yes, you can speak without it)

Disfigure the images. (it's possible to see, isn't it?)

Try to unframe, to pile up, to move (the world, the globe, your eyes)

Don‚t answer yes. Always say no. (never post, nor pre, nor anti, much less pro...)

Speak only this way. See by hook (or by crook). Think this way (think, think, think a lot): Non-video, non-image, non-web,

non-art, non-CD-ROM, non-architecture, non-game, non-who, non-non.

Finished?

Plaf!

Come in.

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain operate by deconstruction. They elaborate temporary universes that defy the forms of identification of the limits between visible and invisible, and of the horizons of legibility, independently of the platform and/or interface they may have chosen.

Typography, graphic design, video, architecture, internet, and CD-ROM are some of the formats that have already been contemplated by the pair. They do not use supports; they transform artifacts and mediatic devices into discursive modalities of unstable diagrams.

They enunciate a culture of appropriation that is in the opposite direction of sampling. In their typographic projects, for example, they establish a dynamic in which the remix paradigm becomes a movement of giving.

After all, what are the fonts for but to be used by other authors in other discursive webs that hide the original author's hand?

Intellectual generosity exercise, copyleft without a flag, many of their creations within the field of typography have been collected in a curious CD-ROM. Its name is “Entre”** The Portuguese word entre has an ambiguous meaning. It means either “come in” (Imperative form) or “between”. (2001), and it brings attached to its title some of its reading keys.

Entre, in this case, is more than a command. Entre is an invitation and a challenge. It is an invitation because it invites us to think about nothing but taking an incursion into its particular universe. It is a challenge because it makes us hesitate when trying to define it.

This is a project that places itself between writing and speaking, between music and drawing, between letter and digit. Without explanations, it gives the reader two possibilities: to touch the images, drawing with sounds, using randomly the computer keyboards, or to install a 26 fonts series.

In the first situation, you choose a fragment of any of the authors' drawings, which come as mini-posters together with the CD, and, as you begin to type, a processing of new forms is initiated at the same time that a soundtrack is composed, giving colour to audio and sound to the lines.

But it is not only this field between audio and vision that is of interest. The fonts also suffer a rigorous treatment that places them within this universe of fluid borders in which typography, image and sound are intercepted in a Deleuzian process of recombination of languages. This Deleuzian influence becomes evident in the epigraph of the CD, a quotation of a passage from “Mille Plateaux”: ”There is rhythm since there is a transcoded passage from one mean to another”.

This axiom is carried out to the limit in the font “Utopia”, created to compose a special edition of “Big” magazine dedicated to Oscar Niemeyer, made with miniatures of the architect's projects as the Memorial da América Latina (São Paulo), and the Palácio da Alvorada (Brasília), as well as the icons of the lack of planning that prevails in the big Brazilian metropolises.

The beautiful lines that made Niemeyer's architecture internationally known were reserved for the capital letters. Traffic signals that are related to endless traffic jams, railings that are set under the bridges to prevent its occupation by homeless people, and other signs of our urban horror were reserved for the small ones.

The small letters were constructed purposely in bigger frames than the capital ones, so that when they are typed together, following the basic orthographic rules, the small ones (urban stuff) come literally on top of the capital ones (forms of the modernist architecture).

From this disposition, a text emerges as a dirty social tissue, in which the impasse between the modernist rigour and beauty and its fragility to confront the uncontrollable urban growing becomes the reading key to part of our recent history, giving urban tension to the sentences without appealing to any vernacular resource.

Mixing varied references, from zuzana licko (typography of the famous Californian studio Emigre) to El Lissitzky's revolutionary design, “Entre” is a CD that exempts the design from any supplemental function. What is designed here is not only what we cannot say in words, not even it gives the mediation between nature and reason to writing.

The relations are not of convention, they rather make we think, quoting Derrida, that the conjunction of the practices of information, cybernetics, and the human sciences leads to a deep subversion, in which the writing appears as “a division without symmetry that designs at one side the closing of the book, and, at the other, the opening of the text”.

The text is not the revelation of a message, but rather a process of questioning the possibility of message, grammatological disturbance that goes through all the projects of Angela and Lain, especially “Pilha” [Pile] (2003).

Here, a writing system made with objects (re)translates what surrounds us into visual statements that implode the letter to give volume to the breaking of the horizontality of the line. It works basically by the piling up of identical objects that, in a scale of 1 to 26, relate the number of objects to phonetic values. Thus, 1 potato = a; 2 potatoes = b; 26 potatoes = z.

The space is diluted into combinatory possibilities, among sentences of sugar cubes, books, vases, quoting Deleuze again, between differences and repetitions, producing an essential vertigo that is effectuated by the desestabilization of form (revitalized by the number) that is transformed into letter, disappears in the object and is faded out in its specificity to come back as a process of questioning no more the possibility of message, but the possibilities of language.

That is what the video ”Flatland” (2003) expands and exceeds, slicing pixels, perverting the logic of the frame to create colours that do not belong to the videographic set of colours, making possible the visualisation of crayon colours that are not there.

It is a liquid documentary that dilutes the motion image into stills, transforming the plains of the Mekong River Delta into multiple rainbows animated by the murmuring sounds of its banks.

The banks of the river, of the image. Edges. More than this. Folds. Deleuze again….

The technique (tool) used is simple. The technology (production of the cognitive repertoire) is complex. The sequence captured by a mini-DV is divided into isolated pictures, a banal resource of its own edition program. The horizontal pictures are then sliced vertically. Each slice is extended up to the size of the original frame. So, unlikely rainbows are born, rainbows that triangulate the vision as Merleau-Ponty wanted to see (and taught us to see).

Is it possible to watch “Flatland” without remembering the master of the visible (Merleau-Ponty, any doubt?!) that taught us to perceive the magic of the figurations of the “instant of the world” that Cézanne wanted to paint?

That crazy instant that passed long ago, and do not come back, but never really passes, because it makes and remakes itself in all the rocks that are and are not in the mountains of Saint Victory that this poet of light, Cézanne, painted to unbalance everything that we understood as colour, light, shadow and figuration.

A noble, disdainful gesture that comes back - with everything - in the colours, the patience, the light, the disdain of “Flatland”. The plain earth that elevates itself from the pixel sculpted in colour that does not have and does not portray.

There, a movement announces itself to come back merciless in the aggressive, subtle, inhospitable gesture that is imposed in “Seoul/Killing Time” (2003). Fine irony. Macabre. Arrogant. The portrayal of the world of the videogames. Fibs. Annoyances. Frauds.

A city expatriated by fashion entertainment corporations, a scenery for an uncommon scene. Aeroplanes are landing on the territory of a city that is transformed into a mere space of action for imbecile players. There, something happens that breaks the rules: the idiot game turns into a story of a desertion.

This is against the norm of imbecility, the paradigm of the stupid rhythm. This is against the ones who think that the most interesting thing in the digital culture is to accept the rules, to attack, and to win.

Against the fetishist rhetoric that takes videogames seriously, Angela and Lain urge us to treat the games as they are: ideological sceneries of vulgar motivation: to kill, to die, or to win.

Again, the technique is simple but the technology is complex. The game (bellicose, sexist, Wasp) has its stage captured by a video camera connected to the computer. The stage is remodelled in 3D - to the very taste of the stupid, blind client - and turns into a maquette of the ignorance show, where we have the most banal premises. A city without scale, without people.

Fine irony. It is only possible to laugh about it if you are able to fool the world's movement, to digitalize your coordinates, to do a “world align” (2003) exercise… to play with coordinates, to move the map - after all, we are in globalisation time, aren't we? - back and forth.

It is all on the screen and it is not…. So it is possible to abstract the topology, and redesign the geography, to work with the lines of a design, instead of giving way to the hardness of the territories. In a simple, precise gesture, the world map is divided into parallel lines, as if it was a blank page, open to our conquering.

Thus, it is possible to submit it to the rules of text edition, aligning the continents with the left, the centre, or the right side of the monitor, without stopping, always in loop, breaking the orbital and other rules, behaving as architectonic matter ready to be modified by geographical irregularities and history.

To face architecture as if it was a plan of change (rather than an action of change) is also one of the recurrent presuppositions of Angela and Lain, which are evident in projects like “5 Times 10 Steps” (2003) and “Plaf!” (2004).

In the first case, five ladders of different sizes were scattered around the place of the exposition at the Palais de Tokyo. They were interacting with the ambience, for its heights were determined by the characteristics of the places where they were set, and the steps' spacing were defined by their respective heights.

Difference and Repetition, again. Relational architecture of deconstruction and chance… as in “Plaf!”, an intervention made at the façade of the Galeria Vermelho, in São Paulo, which inverted the positions of the ground and the wall.

Again, the technique used was simple, but the technology was complex. The white paint was scraped from the façade, and the white stained ground was projected, questioning the role of the structure in the process of the observer's orientation, as well as the role of the fullness and emptiness in the functioning of the house-machine.

Undoing of structures, perversion of the glance, piling ups, realignments, interference, appropriation, phonetic deconfiguration, and some endless questions: What do you see when you see? How do you read what you read? Do you read?

Italicised by me. Italicised by them.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "FF>>Dossier 001>>Angela Detanico e Rafael Lain". Available at: . São Paulo, April, 2004.

essay_ Alice Miceli_ "Unportrayable Light-years" - by Giselle Beiguelman

Unportrayable Light-years

By Giselle Beiguelman

What fascinates me the most in Alice’s work is her ability to face the ephemeral, refusing the logic of the instantaneous. Always investing in the image of that which cannot be portrayed, she seems to position her cameras like an astronomer, and not as a documentary filmmaker, witness, or narrator.

Astronomers are scientists who defy our earthly measurings, based in references that are anthropocentric to a greater or lesser extent, such as feet and inches, which clearly have the human body as their parameter, or the meter, based in the dimensions of the Earth.

Their distance unit is the light-year, the distance that light travels in one year on empty space, at the speed of three hundred thousand kilometers per second. The farther an object is, the more light-years are travelled, because the distance that its light travels is greater. This generates a disconcerting phenomenon that was described with rare simplicity and poetry by physicist Marcelo Gleiser: “To look at the cosmos is to travel to the past.”

After all, the light that we see corresponds to the object as it used to be in the past, and not as it is in the present. Just to have a notion of the scales of displacement involved in this relation, it is enough to remember that the light of the Andromeda galaxy, the neighbor of Earth, left there two million years ago, or at roughly the time when the human species was formed.

In such spatial scales of displacement, an instant does not seem to make any sense. Here, it does not matter which is assumed as “real time,” and which intoxicates the media discourse so much, the virtuality of the intersection of the here and now with the there and then. What matters is to be aware that the present, in many dimensions, is only the past, and that what one sees as real is nothing but cosmic dust. And it is here that Alice forces us to rethink the current strategies for dealing with history and memory, assaulting us, without terror, with traces of human action, in politics and science, that are at times morbid, at others, imponderable, often tragic.

Without making a display, for example, she invites us to contemplate the weight of pain felt by victims of political prisons in Cambodia with her 88 de 14.000, made in 2004. The project, one of the highlights at the transmediale.05, features pictures of eighty-eight out of the fourteen thousand killed in a Khmer Rouge prison, in the 1970s.

The hours or days that passed from the time of entering prison, when the picture was taken, until execution are represented by the period of time during which images are projected onto a wall of sand. In this suspended time, we are converted from spectators into accomplices of a gut-wrenching silence that seems enmeshed in the ethereal walls of the projection. It is a nearly suffocating silence, because it is incapable of retaining the phantasmagoric images that are projected in the interval between the last picture in life/first instant of death for each of these eighty-eight faces in a crowd of fourteen thousand people.

This elasticity of time, this enigma of interval, of the inefficacy of human measures against the duration of life, including that which separates life from death, is the element that, it seems to me, places Alice’s projects in a single, dense line of research.

In 14 horas, 54 minutos, 59,9…segundos (2006) she proposes a very short long video, which lasts forty seconds, and in which she extends the last moment of photographer Robert Capa, founder of the Magnum agency, manipulating the last photograph taken by one of the greatest artist-documentary makers of all time.

Alice reminds us that in Vietnam, at fourteen hours and fifty-five minutes of May 25, 1954, photographer Robert Capa stepped on a mine and died, while covering the Indochina War. Nevertheless, the last picture he took, moments before his death, remained in his camera. It shows his travel companions, the soldiers, crossing the field that extends into a horizon that Capa contemplated and captured in his photograph, but which he never crossed.

In the few seconds of the video, Alice stretches this last second and makes us wonder: what is the duration of the time interval between the click of Capa’s last picture and death? Is it possible to measure the time of pain, of the unstoppable, and imponderable aspects of history? Would it be possible to imagine the unportrayable character of memory?

Those are questionings that the “limit-images” by Alice suggest in a style that, at times, hints at a certain skepticism similar to that of Drummond (TN: Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade).

Watching Alice’s videos, it is difficult not to hear the verses of the poet who taught us that memory is resistance to what is tangible and the senses of demise. Something that is present with both delicacy and power in the video Little White House (2005), which portrays the trip from the Chelmno-nad-Nerem concentration camp, in Poland, to the nearest village, alongside two survivors of Nazi violence. The path is short, but not the pain and the imponderable aspect of the time that is lodged in that space.

And Little White House works with this paradox, stretching the trip into a fictional time of forty minutes, as if seeking not the measure of pain, but once again a limit-image that will allow itself to be cut through by the unportrayable aspects of memory and history.

Not only does this unportrayable defy the logic of the instantaneous, but also that of the presumed current technical ability to provide a visible shape to our own genetic code.

In an extreme situation, such as that of monozygotic twins, which have the same DNA, what does the mapping of their genetic code portray?

By making herself a target for her own cameras, Alice begins with this question to force us once again to think about the interval and the unportrayable.

In Ínterim/auto-retrato, for twenty minutes she shows her face turning into that of her identical twin sister. The transformation is so slow that the image appears to be still. Alice said: “Me and her, we are so alike, one has the impression that little or no change takes place. Nevertheless, between the initial and final points, the images run the gamut of all the minimal degrees of difference between us two. These images are neither me, nor her, but rather one and other, that which we have not been. Based on the two only real actualizations of a same genetic heritage—me, the first one to be born, and my sister, who was born twenty minutes later—a series of potential phenotypes was created. This series fulfills the interval between the two of us. In this interim, what takes place is a virtual sequence of unrealized possibilities. They are everything that I have not been until there was her, and everything that she has not been until there was me.”

When projected in a sequence, within intervals that have no scale of parameter in human measures, these nonhappenings announce what is to come in Alice’s award-winning project of invisible images of Chernobyl.

In this new enterprise, she seeks to produce a series of radiographic images of the exclusion zone through the very radiation that haunts the place, using a pinhole lead camera specially built for her project.

Working only with the radiation present in the exclusion zone, Alice’s proposal is to provide a body to the immeasurable aspect of destruction. In the emptiness that will be imprinted, we might be able to glimpse the invisible light-years within each fleeting moment “unportrayed” by her astronomical lenses.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "ff>>dossier 027>>Alice Miceli". Available at: . São Paulo, March, 2007.