Associação Cultural Videobrasil

duVA body

One of duVa's earliest works-as he likes his name to be spelled-was the four-minute-long experimental video Grotesque, from 1987. Among his most recent works is the video performance Grotesco Sublime MIX (GSMIX), first presented in 2005. From the 1980s onwards, two decades have passed as he develops his poetic project. The issues raised herein are: why discuss duVa today, and under which circumstances?

There are many different ways of perceiving the presence of a gesture, an aesthetic action, and its creative contexts, just as there are many different ways of discussing the symbolic dimension of an artwork. Nevertheless, at the core of each interpretation lies a subjective experience. Therefore, it would be better for us to approach multiple character types, with regard to the notion of grotesqueness, and thus choose to analyze what we consider to be a hybrid, shapeless feature in the work of Luiz Duva, born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1965.

Why duVa?

First off, duVa's artistic existence is not about interpreting the world, but rather experiencing the world. It is about the issue of thought as a strategy, or as a process of subjectivation, as Deleuze put it. Therefore, this essay is not about introducing duVa as a subject, but rather introducing him in his dimension as a thought-artist.

He started on his path in the 1980s making fiction. This is a relatively difficult task in a country like Brazil, whose foundation lies in the daily soap operas on TV. How can one implement, within this genre, a language displacement?

Deus come-se is a video made by duVa in 1990. The figure of a man is thoroughly fragmented through electronic editing. The action, like a puzzle or a construction over an abyss (an edit within an edit), is raised to the deconstructive dimension characteristic of art discourses. In the video, image processing turns concepts into images. This is a key feature of creation using types of electronic media in which, more than the humanism of the sight that is led by the cameras, as Dubois put it, it is the hand that touches, fondles, gropes, infiltrates, edits, and consequently provides meaning.

Like a geometrician, by means of multiple cuts that he makes upon the screen, in Deus come-se duVa accomplishes a type of mathematically constructed edit. In it, he exerts semantic and syntactic control through the decomposition of a body in a fictional action. The body has an ambiguous character, something that is only possible in electronic media, since it appears to be fixed and, at the same time, moving in a series of successive cuts. Moreover, as the human body is cut to pieces, it bumps into an insect in a Kafka-like situation. Anguishingly and, at the same time, ironically, a bull has its throat cut, is dismembered, bleeds, and is killed. Meanwhile, the insect and the man try to devour or dominate each other. Their bodies dialogue with each other, and they recognize themselves based on each other. Nevertheless, it is the video's image and sound-metaphorically speaking-that eats them away, devours them, and subverts them through a tragic purging effect, or a sight that is too close. Better yet, the image has the power to transform them into a body that is different, grotesque, part man part animal, a denial of divine creation. 

If Deus come-se was generated at the core of a creative process that began two decades ago, to speak of Luiz Duva today means, more than anything else, to speak of a consistent poetic proposition which not only stands the test of time, but also has the power to give off a worldview. Along that line of thought, one can also realize the timeless dimension in which that worldview is expressed. For example, just as Peter Bruegel from the Netherlands conveyed his grotesque perception during the Renaissance, one can notice similar aesthetic gestures nowadays, be it in the work of artists such as Matthew Barney, in the international context, or in the work of artists such as Luiz Duva, in the Brazilian context.

Why the aesthetics of the grotesque?

Pointing out to grotesque aesthetic experiences in the work of duVa means linking him to a repertoire aimed at discussing human contradictions, represented during 19th-century romanticism by Victor Hugo, through contaminated operations that prompt scorn and laughter, ranging from tragedy to comedy, from the sublime to the grotesque. In that moment, opposing himself to classical norms, Hugo* presented, with his modern drama, the principles of mixing genres, of rejecting rules, of refusing to imitate models, and of freedom in art.

For Guinsburg, it is through the paradox, the unlikely, and the abyssal vortex, that the art of the grotesque destabilizes and sets everything it touches into motion, unbalancing harmonic relationships, juxtaposing in the same axiological horizon the high and the low, the refined and the rude, the fair and the beastly, the tragic and the comic**. That is the direction in which language displacement takes place in Luiz Duva's propositions. It is not only a semantic displacement, it is also a syntactic one. The displacement occurs both in singular procedures (as is the case with the disruption of fiction in Deus come-se) and in the limit situations he submits electronic media to in his work.

Such statement stems from the act of observing duVa's perceptive gestures as stemming from a type of intelligence that is oriented towards unconformity, hybridism, and the disorganization of forms. In Deus come-se, the grotesque takes place through disarticulation, or the disaggregation of the whole for the fragment, with the intent of exploring, in video, multiple views and their most complex procedures. Here, the displacement happens through the deconstruction of motion and the way in which he undoes symmetrical arrangements, within the context of editing the work. That is, through the insertion of motion as a fictional element in the very plane of image-video. 

Deus come-se, though, is not the only case in which grotesque gestures and language displacements occur in duVa's work. Such phenomena also take place in Jardim Rizzo (1992), in Momentos antes... (1995), and later on, in The bodymen lost in heaven (1996), among others. All of these are fictional videos, and they all build upon the problematic of the grotesque. 

Thus, the grotesque appears in duVa's artistic practice under the logic of reversion. For this and other reasons, the aesthetic action of the grotesque in his work stems from the way in which he promotes a language that is incompatible with preestablished norms, thus disclosing the expansion of expressive forms.

The reading of the language used by an artist who crosses through media pathways, or deterritorialized landscapes, can be considered, as Plaza would put it, as the reading of parallel, simultaneous universes that tend to lose their contours and fixed boundaries. Thus, like a multiple sensoriality, duVa's trajectory in Brazilian art can be presently seen as a moving, shapeless drawing in the field of electronic media image and sound.

Collective body

Sometimes we feel as if image in the contemporary world were no longer able to express itself. The problem is no longer how to make image express itself, but rather to provide it with another instance of power. 

Image is a symbolic construction; its production requires a series of operations which, in this case, consist of working with the expansion of current electronic media. It is up to the artist, then, to draw from this reality in order to bring new circumstances to the sensory-motor scheme of image.

Luiz Duva brings new circumstances to contemporary image by means of the disorder in his syntactic system. The hard determinism with which duVa edited his early works gave way, towards the end of the 1990s, to a process of introducing chance and randomness in the field of image production. He began articulating images by using the logic of imprecision, incorporating the unforeseeable and the mobility of information into them. 

duVa, who used to make videos for the TV screen, now moved toward other sensory spaces. Thus, he expanded the motion of image, taking it to the architectural environment of video installations, as well as to the synesthetic, immersive improvisations of his VJing presentations.

In 2001, duVa made Corpomóvel 1 e 2, a combination of installation and performance. The work is like a mobile production, editing, and image manipulation unit in which duVa recorded, edited, and presented the work to the audience, all at once. The motion of image, which had already been fictionalized and turned into installation, now became a performance as well. 

In keeping with this more hybrid nature, still in 2001, another expressive body came up in his images: the collective body produced during his live image presentations, also known as live video presentations. During this period, by means of partnerships such as the one involving Videobrasil, duVa created work of the likes of PVC (2001) and A mulher e seu marido bife (2001).

In Vermelho sangue (2002), a video performance presented along with musician Wilson Sukorski, twelve projection screens were specially designed for the 1st Brazilian Festival of VJs - Red Bull Live Images. On these screens, duVa showcased the undetermined, ever-changing language of scratching, the electronic cutting of image, as he immersed himself in the environment of the electronic scene.

Departing from formal control, the expressiveness of duVa's images gained new dimensions. His work was no longer about decomposing images in a calculated fashion, or aimed at obtaining a finished audiovisual product, as in Deus come-se; little by little, his creative process became more open to informality, to the lack of control and finishing. His works began coexisting in space with more plural and collaborative dialogues, thus embracing the creative body of the other, who is also under displacement in the acts of visiting, entering, living, and sharing his video installations and video performances. 

Following those experiments, in 2003 duVa presented the video performance Desconstruindo Letícia Parente: Marca registrada, a minimalist exercise in appropriating and deconstructing another video performance. In this case, he dismantled Marca registrada (1974) by Letícia Parente. This work, which pioneered video art in Brazil, has nothing to do with live image. Rather, it is a tribute to the artist Letícia Parente, expanding her image into three simultaneous screens, and setting her ideas into the realm of live video manipulation.

More recently, duVa has broadened the dimension of image even further in the fields of improvisation, and of presenting his work to audiences. In order to do so, he began working with interfaces and interactivity. This is how he made the installation Demolição (2004). In this work, duVa proposes a sort of virtual demolition of the image. The demolishing effect is accomplished by pushing the buttons on an interface, as the audience before a projection conducts the events like in a videogame and, aesthetically speaking, demolishes the image.

duVa body

In a very particular way, duVa currently incorporates a musical dimension into his work through image sampling. It is by means of this cross-procedure of image and audio samples, or by playing synesthetic games in the technological realm, that image becomes capable of producing sound. If electronic image, like music, exists only in time, that is, in duration, rhythm, frequency-as Machado put it-, then we can assume that, in a direction opposite to that of video art pioneers (the great majority of whom, such as Paik, came from the musical realm), duVa reactivates these abstract dialogues, inverting them, and taking images back to the field of audio experiments.

A fruit of this wide array of experiences, Luiz Duva's artistic maturation occurs in a moment in which his audiovisual writing presents itself most radically as cinematic expression, plasticity, and sensoriality: it is pregnant with inner motion. It is in the quest for these new aesthetic substances that his trajectory takes on the dimension of a poetic body, or a duVa body. Such a distinct, impure, undetermined, nonstandardized, and shapeless body of language expands the very dimension of media, and returns to its origins: it becomes shadow, brightness, drawing, painting, photogram, frame, sampler, it becomes itself contemporary imagery and thinking.

* Hugo exposes this view in his Preface to Cromwell. 

** Guinsburg exposes this view in the introduction to the Brazilian edition of Wolfgang Kayser's The Grotesque in Art and Literature. 

Bibliographical References

Deleuze, Gilles. Conversações, 1972-1990 / Gilles Deleuze. Translated by Peter Pál Pelbart. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 1992.

Dubois, Philippe. Introduction to Video, Cine, Godard, by Jorge La Ferla. Buenos Aires: Libros Del Rojas/Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2001.

Hugo, Victor. Do Grotesco e do Sublime: tradução do Prefácio de Cromwell. Trans. and notes by Célia Berrettini. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2004.

Kayser, Wolfgang. O Grotesco. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2003.

Machado, Arlindo. Máquina e Imaginário. O Desafio das Poéticas Tecnológicas. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Edusp, 1996.

Mello, Christine. Extremidades do Vídeo. Doctoral dissertation, PUC-SP, Communication and Semiotics, 2004.

Plaza, Julio. Tradução Intersemiótica. São Paulo/Brasília: Perspectiva/CNPq, 1987.

What is your background?

I have an academic background in communications, radio, and TV. I was a professional volleyball player from thirteen until twenty-one years of age, but even back then I knew I wanted to work with images. In volleyball, I struggled real hard with my body and got in touch with my physical limitations-a struggle I returned to in my work with images. I had no flexibility; I was slow. So I became interested not in the game itself, but in overcoming the limitations of the body. At the same time, I knew I didn't want to play volleyball, I wanted to make images. So I quit playing, saved some money and stayed in Europe for a year, just going to rock concerts and art shows. 

Did you have any previous contact with art or image?

None at all. Just photography. Although I had no formal knowledge or training, I was good at taking pictures. The contact with art got me further into the image thing: Francis Bacon, William Turner, William Blake. Stuff that changes your life a little bit. Video was there when I needed a tool to express myself, but if video did not exist I would probably be a painter.

How did you get to make videos?

When I returned from my trip, me and three of my friends bought a VHS camera. I was already studying communications in college. I felt a need to put something together, an image, but I didn't know exactly what it was. I had an emotional drive that exploded in my early works, which were totally unconscious. In No time to cry, I wanted to record a beggar in the street. While searching for someone, I passed by my grandmother's house and asked if I could record her. I also had some footage of the abandoned Matarazzo factory no one was allowed to enter. I went down there with my girlfriend, there was a hole in the wall and we went inside. I had these two images and did not know what to do with them, so I edited them, and they turned into the story of my family. This unconscious approach is still present in my work. No matter how cerebral or conceptual I get, no matter how many reference points I have, this approach is my foundation.

When did the narrative issues arise?

The passive approach to watching audiovisual works has always bothered me. The viewer is watching, but his view is that of a third person. I have always wondered who is that person watching the scene. Oh, is that me? If so, then I want in, I want to participate. A paixão segundo Bruce is a narrative story. Afterwards, I did Jardim Rizzo, in which you get the points of view of all involved. It is part of a larger project: the story of a person who is drowning and watches life go by. Whoever watched the video could change the story. I had neither technology nor money, so I recorded a few scenes and went broke. I did nothing for a while, and when I got back I began to get interested neither in the story nor in the narrative itself, but in creating scenes. My latest fiction work, The bodymen lost in heaven, consisted of separate, living, independent scenes of a couple; scenes that resulted from an emotion of mine, over which I had no control. But when I filmed it, I knew: “This is what I want. I am no longer interested in the story, I am interested in this image, which is a picture.” 

So that's how you got into installations?

My first installation project came up when I was recording Bruce: from the street, I saw a three-window apartment. There was a TV set in each window, and all were tuned to the same channel, but whenever the scene would change, one TV set would take a micro longer to change than the others. I saw the changing tones of light, and that image got me thinking about the possibility of distending time, of an installation within a different kind of space, one I would be able to walk into. The Internet didn't even exist back then. Soon thereafter, I read an article about the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), about elastic media, that whole thing. But my installations were never based on theoretical concepts, they were based on images. In INSPIREme, in 1999, for the first time ever, I treated the image as a painting. I used a Plasma 98 in vertical position and an image of a girl breathing. It looks like a painting by Caravaggio. 

When did the sound become important in your work?

In 1998, I made an installation about a poem by Lorca for SESC, and I wanted to work with the smashing of the image. Not the physical smashing of the medium, but the smashing of the image itself. I studied, I made drawings, I wanted a holographic image, a tube beam for people to stand underneath, but it didn't work. In order to maintain the original concept, I ended up choosing a cheap stage design solution. People would lie down in a gurney on the floor and look up, and we had a huge tube TV set that two technicians would move up and down. But we also had the sound, and it was through sound that I managed to accomplish the conceptual part of the work: to give the person lying there the sensation of being smashed by the image. That was the first time I did a soundtrack. 

How did you go from installations to performances, and then on to the dance floors?

When I did INSPIREme, I had just gotten into nonlinear editing, and it changed my life. I became interested in the graphic frame thing. In the timeline, I was finally able to see the image no longer attached to the medium, but free from it, in a way. Nonlinear editing confronts you with chance all the time, and it gives you the possibility of playing the image like an instrument. It enables you to manipulate, to improvise, and that opened up an entirely new realm for me. By then, I was no longer interested in the construction of a scene or an image; I was interested in deconstructing motion. If I have a still image and I hit Play, the image gets diluted into twenty, thirty frames, it loses the power of the still image. I asked myself: “How can I get that back?” That was where my whole performance work began. And when I went to the dance floor, my whole take on life changed. The first time I went to a rave party, in 1999, I was like: “This here is a sensorial installation like no other, I will never be able to put together something like this. I want to come in here with images and try to match them spatially with the sounds, which are spatial as well.”

How did your VJ work give way to live image?

Once you are really capable of having control over the construction of image and the creation of ambiences, which is a situation quite similar to an installation, then you also gain control over another power: the power of sound and image combined. For me, the dance floor was like a laboratory. It was real cool working with live improvisation, with the possibility of placing the image inside an ambience, of working with the image within the space, of creating a narrative that is no longer placed inside the medium, of proposing for people to experience audiovisuals in a new way. But there came a time when I was no longer interested in being in a situation over which I did not have full control. That's the reason I got into closed projects, audiovisual compositions in which I could control the sound as well, as in Vermelho sangue and Desconstruindo Letícia Parente. 

How did you come up with the concept of moving cells?

In Imagem não Imagem, from 2003, an exhibition curated by Christine Mello at Galeria Vermelho, eight artists worked using a documentary film by Arlindo Machado, Complemento nacional, that had been made using leftovers from journalistic films from the 1970s, as their starting point. Each artist was supposed to think about the film, create a piece of work, and feed it into a database. I had never worked with documentary images before. Around that time, a friend asked me to tape one of his performances. The piece was pretty bad, but the images had some graphic quality to them. I started to mess around with them and that's when I discovered the moving cells: through live manipulation, I seek an image behind that footage, something that wasn't there to begin with. That opened up a whole universe for me. Then, in Grotesco Sublime MIX (2005), I recorded a workshop of Teatro da Vertigem, and when I tried to edit it in a documental style, nothing came up. The sensations I had while watching the workshop, of feeling horny, scared, or disgusted, none of them showed up in the images. At that time, I was working with a software that didn't run properly in my computer, and maybe because I had to deal with that limitation, it opened up a brand new realm of manipulation for me. Grotesco Sublime MIX is the resut of an unique 16-minute session of improvising with this tool. From it I learnt about the power of performance, of live manipulation, and also that the important thing for me is not technology, but the thought flow that's behind it. In the end, I hadn't used 100% of the software possibilities, but still I had managed to recover the power of the original image that was there, pulsating, striving to jump out of the screen.

Is the idea of recovering the original feeling still a key issue in your work?

Retratos in motion: o beijo was my first project to start off from a medium and not an image. One day, I was with Patrícia, my girlfriend, we were kissing, I was real happy, and, as I had my cell phone in my pocket, I started taking pictures. I didn't know what the pictures looked like, I couldn't see them. I fed the pictures into a computer and, using a panoramic image software, which puts images together, I made a series of short videos. Then, using a manipulation software, I began processing the image, as if I were trying to go to other areas of it, trying to set them in motion. The moment of the kiss had been lost, and the entire work was an attempt to recover it. I have a new project, Landscape of My Dreams, in which I propose exercises designed to investigate the relationship between the initial moment of creation of an image/action and its result, mediated by the camera. In one of these exercises, I would thrust my body against a wall. As I jumped onto the wall, I stumbled upon the limit of the physical body, my untrained body which creates the image and the action, but that action was not the one I had imagined, neither did the captured image match my feelings before the action. And then, through manipulation, I managed to seek it, to recover it, and bring it to the surface of the image. That's what moves me.

How did you come up with the concept for Tríptico: estudo para auto-retrato 1, awarded at the 15th Videobrasil?

The body has always been the essence of my work, but it took me a long time to be able to put my own body into my work. The moment I record the image on my body, it no longer has the Duva identity, it becomes a shape. The day I recorded the image for that work, I was pissed off, had no ideas, so I started toying with the computer and caught a glimpse of what was there behind the picture. It became an installation at Paço das Artes, and halfway through I sent it to Videobrasil. I had no expectations, because the piece was a triptich. After doing performances at the Festival in 2001, and live image presentations with Letícia Parente in 2003, it was really cool to return for the Competitive Exhibition, not with something I no longer believe in, which is showing a video in single channel, shown as a triptich at the Play Gallery. Because Auto-retrato is a performance, since I have manipulated that image, and also due to the dialogue among the three of them, barking at each other.

You intend to develop audiovisual scores for your plays. Where does that need come from?

The first time I wrote a little score, in order to know what to do during a play, was in Desconstruindo Letícia Parente. The audiovisual play must not only be rehearsed, as if you were a musician, but you also have moments of solo, ad-lib video. How can I divide a play into moments that are more narrative, others that are freely improvised, and others yet in which I might be part of a quartet? The visual score is very important in works of art, of technology, of new media, because these types of work get lost, they are made using platforms and software that will no longer exist five years down the road. But, if you have a score and you have the images, you can load it into any software, and fifty years from now somebody can do it again. Well, maybe not that long. That would be too much pretension. But, at the same time, I would like to do something much bigger. I would like to do a performance at Upper Xingu, up there in the borderline between soy plantations and deforestation, and I would like to do another one down at Chuí, I would like to use satellites.

Your work has frequently led you to engage in fights with the available technologies. How do you relate to these limitations?

I use whatever tool is accessible. I have never been interested in developing technologies. My background has always been creation-oriented. In the twenty installations I have done, I've struggled with that issue all the time: in order to do what I wanted, I had to develop new technologies. And, having no access to technology, I would just hold on to the original concept, and then I would adapt it to whatever was available. I could leave, dedicate myself to studying software for a year, but damn, in one year I can do two installations, and to me that means one thousand thoughts, much more important thoughts. There are people abroad working with a different approach, such as Daito Manabe or Golan Levin, both artists who develop their own softwares. Their work is so sophisticated, and yet so simple, that you just don't see the technology anymore. That has always interested me. Recently, I found out that my work is no longer created in order to be an installation or a live image presentation. It is an image. Maybe I have managed, lately, to do exactly what I had been trying to do since the beginning: an image in itself. 

In the trajectory of Luiz Duva, from São Paulo, the construction of personal video narratives unfolds into two sophisticated, complementary lines of research: on the one hand, the perfecting of artistic practices that allow one to recover and bring “to the surface of the image” senses and sensations usually ignored by this type of medium; on the other hand, the attempt to expand the audiovisual experience beyond the limits of duration and medium. While the first line leads Duva to experiment with different shapes and media, from single channel to installation, from VJing sessions in dance floors to the immersive environments where he carries out his live image sessions, the second line of research pushes him further and further into image-where he discovers different ways of manipulating, deconstructing, and playing the frames, improvising, redrawing, and incorporating chance in order to attain plastic power and convey subjective contents. 

The body and its limits have been the main theme of Duva's art since his early works, which he considers to be “explosions” of a straight from the gut, unconscious creative drive, rather than conceptual creations. Born out of the combination of two casual sequences-images of Duva's grandmother and of a forbidden walk through an abandoned factory-, No time to cry, 1988, already boasts unusual experimental density and perception of the medium, above all in the angst-ridden camera motion that matches the sound, a sort of repetitious, circular buzz. This experimental power, which defies the lack of resources, persists in A paixão segundo Bruce (1989), an ironic step towards a narrative style, and in Deus come-se (1990), a flirt with both the grotesque and the plastic aspects of art. In Jardim Rizzo (1992), the same scene is viewed from the perspective of each character, in an exercise that questions the reduction of the audiovisual experience down to a single, compulsory point of view.

The artist went from narrative experiments, which dealt with the narrative itself, to working on the plastic construction of scenes-or, as he put it, to the discovery of “image as a picture.” The bodymen lost in heaven (1996) is a landmark in this respect: in addition to the conflict between the featured couple, the unique aesthetic composition ties together the elements of the work, with scenes, colors, and visual arrangements reminiscent of the artist's classic painting references. The bodymen puts Duva on the path of installation work, a natural vocation of the image/picture. 

Three years later, INSPIREme (1999), which shows the image of a girl breathing in a big vertical plasma screen, inaugurated a long series of installation-portraits with a more plastic verve. Prior to that, the experimental quest down the path of installation led the artist toward an element which, once mastered, would become central in his work: the sound. In Ignácios (1998), built around the poem Pranto por Ignacio Sanches Mejias, by Federico García Lorca, it is the soundtrack (the first one Duva ever scored) that provides the work with direction, materializing his initial intention of conveying to the audience a feeling of being “smashed” by image. 

Also around the time of INSPIREme, Duva traded the analogic editing room for nonlinear editing, dramatically changing his possibilities of manipulating image. If a resource such as slow motion used to be hard to obtain, now he could treat images in a physical way, just as DJs do with sounds, playing them like percussion, scratching them. In his relationship with this new realm of parameters for modifying images-and with the graphic character of timeline editing-the artist discovered the possibility of improvisation, of intervention as a rhythmic gesture, as well as the possibility of finding, in motion, “the power of the still image.”

The possibility of manipulating images-sounds live provided Duva's art with a feature that would become a staple of his work: the action-like quality. His installations became hybrid, as they took over the premises, and became performances-such as A mulher e seu marido bife and PVC, both featured in the programme of the 13th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival, 2001. The idea of placing the image inside an ambience, the improvisation, and the performance-like quality also brought the artist closer to the dance floors of electronic music, where he saw “sensorial installations he would never be able to match.” 

In the following years, Duva organized the first VJ showcase ever carried out in Brazil, the Live Images (featuring VJs and collectives such as Jodele, Spetto, Embolex, Duva, Bijari, Lucas Marguti, Raimo, Alexis, feitoamãos, and Palumbo), and performed alongside DJs such as Junkie XL, 808 State, Jeff Mills, The Youngsters, Anderson Noise, Stereo Total, Patife, Marky, and Joe Carter-as well as Fat Boy Slim, from England-in an event attended by over 180,000 people in Rio de Janeiro. 

The artist's experience as a VJ, an intense specialization period in live image manipulation, proved limited-due to the impossibility of controlling “the full power of sound-image”-, but provided him with moments of great discovery. In Turin, Italy, 2005, during his presentation at the Cluster magazine lounge, Duva attempted to guide his improvisations with colors and shapes not by music, but by the flow of people through space. For the first time in his work, he treated images as light, rather than as signs.

Also in 2002, the focus of Duva's art shifted from VJing to work based on live image manipulation, and immersive environments. A poem, strawberries on his living room floor, and an endoscopy were the elements in the first of these exercises, Vermelho sangue (2002). In the most widely known exercise, presented at the 14th Videobrasil, 2003, Duva performed a live manipulation, to the sound of two remixed electronic tracks, of previously edited excerpts of the work Made in Brasil, in which Brazilian video pioneer Letícia Parente embroiders the sole of her own foot (Desconstruindo Letícia Parente: Marca registrada). 

While studying the “possibility of expanding image to within image itself,” generating new images and sounds by creating an expanded dimension, the artist discovered what he dubbed motion cells: sequences of meaningful images that, when manipulated, would produce different tempos and rhythms. Beginning with documentary material, Duva attained the cells that provided the foundation for the performance Concerto para imagem, som e marreta sobre parede, a part of the exhibition Imagem não Imagem (2003); using digital pictures taken with a cell phone, which he animated using a panoramic software, Duva created the triptych Retratos in motion: o beijo (2005), an immersive environment installation that marked his first appearance on the screen. In both of these works, the live manipulation treatment seeks to retrieve “the image behind the image,” that is, the subjectivity and intensity of the moment that kicks off the entire creative process.

That same line of thought gave birth to the following works: the installation Demolição (2004), a mechanism that, with the push of buttons, produces projections of a wall being demolished, along with percussive sounds; Grotesco Sublime MIX (2005), which transforms material produced during a workshop of Teatro da Vertigem into a triptych of bodies that devour one another; Tríptico: estudo para auto-retrato 1, which garnered him the Le Fresnoy Audiovisual Creation Award - France at the 15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival; and Concerto para células em (de) movimento, a multimedia performance project inside an immersive installation that will be conducted using an audiovisual score-capable of defining improvised movements-the theme of which will be inner landscapes.

Live Images
The Luiz Duva Website features excerpts and reviews of his main works, including videos, VJ presentations, installations, and live image sessions, as well as his biography, a chronology of awards, and recordings of event participations in Brazil, Italy, and France. 

Vorazes, Grotescos e Malvados
In a text published in the electronic magazine Trópico, curator Christine Mello reviews the exhibition Vorazes, Grotescos e Malvados (2005), which gathered together twenty-six artists at Paço das Artes. Regarding the installation Grotesco Sublime MIX, by Luiz Duva, Mello states: “It is a new language expansion for image and sound in electronic media.”

Videobrasil Online

For research: information on the artist's appearances at the International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, videography, works, links, and other references.