Cameraman Daniel Demoustier gives comments on his shooting in Cité Soleil in Haiti. Here under a view on the arena Warum 2.0 showing how the pictures will be presented. A human tetris wall with sensors, in which hosts and visitors can massage the shots.
Filed under: WARUM 2.0
View on WARUM 2.0 on Second Life, by Jonas Hielscher. During the expo from 12 till 17 February live streaming from the arena installation will be added to the site.
Filed under: WARUM 2.0
I am very hesitant when it comes to aesthetics. But I am aware of the many streams of meaning flowing underneath and through any decision made about form. I guess I prefer not to, and let them do their work with the aesthetic potential. Art is definitely there, in Warum 2.0, even if it is avoided, art that is. The same goes with the religious aspect of it. How could religion ever be avoided in this formation, with pictures of war, victims and people suffering? Of the good then, and the bad, as represented by people doing in turn their profit with the pictorial material. In this dual scheme, I’m afraid, Warum 2.0 is fixed on the bad side.
The Warum 2.0 installation arena took the tape ‘Warum Wir Männer die Technik so Lieben’ (1985) as its starting point. Willing nilling, it therefore continues some originally employed aesthetics. The sublime and the subliminal, very present (even in a subversive way) in the original tape, are also still active here, be it distorted. The threatening clouds are back again, enhanced. The closed figure of the circle in the tape has been broken up by four centrifugal spatial curves. The square has been multiplied into many squares of transparant screens and square tables, carrying loads of interface hardware. The tables are positioned in one oblique direction. They suggest an axis cutting through the absolute forms of circle, square and triangle, with an intention of invading the space of the arena. The squared screens do not any longer function as windows neither, as their views create more blindness than clarity. As the television monitor has been replaced by projections and flatscreens, the monitor mirror effect has gone too. There are practically no reflections, definitely not of viewers. The clever narrative structure of the original tape, guiding and misguiding the viewer (manipulating that is), is left behind. If narration is still possible, it will have to be invented by the viewers. And where could it come from, if not out of their experience, as walkers in the dark or as searchers online. Unless something happens, there will be no great story to tell. So then, waiting for the event, in the cave? Or will you visitors call it a labyrinth, a playfield, a studio, a mess (hopefully not a mass. Please).
Why is no crime, somebody told me while building the set. Thank you Rene. Hope then. But there is much more. What if there is no longer the viewer, that dearly wanted, kindred ennemy every maker hopes to reach? What if there is no religion? No victims. Only warriors. Fighting, yes. Please, don’t ask me to stop fighting. For God’s sake, don’t. Notice the pride in the faces Daniel Demoustier filmed in Iraq, in Aghanistan. The kind of pride fighters can show in their face. The question then is also, what do our faces show when looking at these faces? And what happens if they start to mix, to superimpose onto each other, the faces, theirs and ours? What if we see only our faces. The way for example we see faces everywhere, even in the clouds. ‘I saw a face in the clouds and I endowed it with human activity’ (Stewart Guthrie). The question (encore) is: whose human activity?
Six hosts will enact & do 2.0 in the WARUM 2.0 installation arena during the Artefact Festival in Leuven, between 12 and 17 February. Who wants to join and assist them? Interested?
Daniel Demoustier told me that when he was filming the war victims he talked to them and they to him. These conversations however were not recorded. We then, we see the faces, but we don’t hear them speaking to us. So then, why not go back to them? Anybody interested? Support? Suggestions?
Moving image with a comment by cameraman Daniel Demoustier (such will be rarely the case in this blog, in contrast to the daily practice of it on television). Original shooting treated for WARUM 2.0. Obviously, this image is far too layered for a blog… (anyways)
The questioning in the quote here under, by Hans Ulrich Obrist (on page 107, as published by Sternberg New York/Berlin, 2006), can easily be transported from the context of the museum space towards the context of media. This is a stimulating exercise for us of creative reading, maybe also for you.
“How can we actually introduce, reintroduce, or re-inject the notion of smallness into ‘bigger’ conditions? And that leads to the question of complexity, which I would like to address here. After having long discussions about the exterior aspects of museums, which were all about the façade, I think it is also relevant to talk about interior complexity, a new Merzbau condition, which will bring up urgent questions in the next few years about the future of museums. The situation of museums of obviously complex and I think, when we try to work out how to deal with this complexity, it is important not to reduce our reflections to a single model of museum space, but to study several different ones, both historical models and contemporary models, and to take an experimental approach with regard to this complexity.
One of the problems of globalization is the spatial and temporal homogenization of the world of museums, and it is urgent to actually generate a situation which is receptive to a kind of interlocking of spaces, or bridges between the old and new – as exemplified by Rem Koolhaas’s work on the Guggenheim Hermitage in Las Vegas – while also keeping in mind the notions of acceleration and deceleration, moments of speed and moments of slowness, where there should be zones of noise and zones of silence, where there are also negotiations between private and public space”.
PAUL VIRILIO: “We are now moving from the politically correct of the written, writing, the oratorical and the speaker, from the tribune, from politically correct to optically correct for the screen”.
WARUM 2.0 takes the form of a dream, of hallucination even, but without the loss of control normally involved in dreaming and hallucinating. It is not so much based on speed, as it is on suspension. Repetition and suspension that is, of what could have been live, alive, testimony, archive and memory. This space has nothing to do anymore with confusion, neither between fiction and reality, nor between the real and the artifice. It manages and produces illusion.
Warum 2.0, as 2.0, takes the pictures of Daniel Demoustier, the pictures he originally took from war victims, and projects them on transparant screens. The pictures are then repeated, enlarged, doubled and enhanced, until they fill a studio and form a stage, in which hosts and visitors perform as actors. Users and victims, pictures and positions start to double, repeat and mirror each other endlessly through media, until they form a world that becomes real as event, which in turn can be filmed again, even as a newsevent. Of course this event is a pseudo-event. It is an illusion. Like the real in reality tv, it is a non-reality. It is a tv reality, without tv. In the same way the real is no longer where it once was, television does no longer need that kind of real reality. It needs mediareality (no problem, television produces it itself), and it needs ‘us’ in it, to make the event come true.
