Associação Cultural Videobrasil

How and when did you become interested in video works?

It was when I was still at school that I became a student at Oficina de Vídeo de La Esmeralda (La Esmeralda Video Workshop). As a student, and now as a professor, this place has always been of vital importance for my development as a visual artist. I specialized in design. I believe there are many temporal vestiges, movements, and description of space in design.

The relation between space, time and movement seems to be a constituent element of your videos, as well as the simulation of typical TV noises. We can perceive it in the appropriation of Gombrich's text together with the images that are gradually extended in Passeo Catódico (1999) and in the movement of images which are mostly vestiges and noises in Malgré-tout (2001). How do you view this relation between the recording of movement and its re-creation during the editing process?

My first obsession was computer editing. The virtual space provided by the software highlights equivalences between plane and duration; with this tool, you can anticipate the movements of an image and create virtual spaces in video. The action, the displacement in space and the camera movement must be planed. “Passeo Catódico” is the representation of a temporal and spatial fragment that follows the character along an axis perpendicular to the view, while the text is the element that runs along the depth axis, bringing us to the digital surface. “Malgré-tout” and “Rey” are circular and cyclical spaces.

In Flicker (2000), it seems that you appropriate video's own typical noises in order to record a movement which does not exist in the original film La Tormenta, by Fernando Vallejo. What is your view on this relation between the recording of movement in the cinema and in video art?

This work, I believe, is mainly a graphic resolution which comes from the interpretation of a medium by another medium; the cinema is interpreted by video art, and the latter has been interpreted to be digitalized. This is a series of altered speeds organized in a way to reproduce movement. In this case, the video fields tend to disentangle themselves and produce vibration. In this work, as in Mismo, I used a peripheral with a jog that was part of the equipment. In the case of Mismo, there is a direct manipulation in real time, I mean, there are effects but there is no rendering. Apart from the technical aspect, I believe this work uses these discrepancies to figure or to speak about an experience, be it traumatic, religious or through memory. This is important because, from an expressive, artistic point of view, the standard time of reproduction is not always what we expect. Undoubtedly, much of the cinematic language is built on expressiveness and on the need to simulate reality, and our own ways to represent reality and memory come partly from cinema.

Your work moves between different genres (television, documentary, video art). Is your work “contaminated” by these genres, I mean, is there an exchange between them?

Documentary and television came after video art and derive from it, though lately I have produced Escribe en mi, which is basically a documentation of an artistic project. I am interested in documenting manual and artistic processes, as well as the work of art. In doing it I find many meanings. I have a fantastic video recorded in Brazil which shows the preparation of some dishes. This process is extremely beautiful and expressive. I hope to edit this material in 2005.

In 2003, you were in residency at ZKM, in Germany, in order to develop video projections for an opera. How was your experience at ZKM, and how do you view the work you have done with Iván Edeza?

The most important was to achieve an agreement that could satisfy Iván Edeza, the director Renate Ackermann, and me. The understanding of the stage necessities and the working with documents which were unintelligible to me like plots, scores or the software in German were extremely stressful and exciting at the same time. I believe my one-month stay in Germany with Iván was very useful to my project, for we had the opportunity to contemplate many works of art that we both like and that influenced both of us.

How do you view the electronic art scene in Mexico today?

It is too intellectual and hermetic, as much as the multimedia scene, with artistic values and objectives that are not well-defined. Video art has its place within a pre-established idea of art which is still based on (an altered) conceptualism, using different media in a restricted way, according to the art market system. Video art has not been extending the idea of artistic objects and traditional goods. The concept of electronic art, I believe, is misunderstood in regard to its mediatic possibilities of generating communitarian concepts of society and media.