Monica oswan3/23/2023 It took eight stab wounds to destroy the photographs, eight violent blows that reduced them to a state of total immateriality. Each of these violently changes the appearance of the images until they are completely unreadable. The same process was repeated several times, resulting in a series of videos showing other videos. Next, the camera was placed in front of the computer screen and a second video of the same presentation was made. Starting with a quick presentation of old images uploaded online, an initial video was made showing the images in quick succession. 8STABS was born out of the desire to destroy this agglomeration of photographs, to remove them from screens through a process that directly involves them. Users re-upload them, search engines keep them in their databases, and in the most extreme cases, not even the search engines keep them in their databases, and in extreme cases not even the postal police can remove them completely. They seem almost immortal, especially if they go viral. Many images, after being published, become indestructible, even if the author's wish is to delete them forever. An exploration in impermanence, embodiment, and the mediating presence of the screen, the work captures the breath - making it visible just long enough to be confronted by both performer and viewer. The illusion in the video is uncanny and the screen itself becomes the edge of the razor that separates both past from present, performer from viewer, and the living presence of the viewer from the illusion of life on the screen. This work references the use of the “breath test” in the era before modern medicine where a mirror would be placed under the nose of the dying to test for respiration. When shown, it creates the illusion that the performers are breathing against the surface of the screen. In these video portraits performers exhale slowly against an unseen piece of glass, fogging and obscuring their faces in fleeting moments between breaths. The breath is a constant reminder of our physicality and an anchor to our embodied experience. “.we are walking the razor’s edge-we are in the present moment.” Sountrack: Handplant, by EVN from his album Oh Cruel Science, on Enklav label The piece is inspired by the Vasulkas’ Scan Processor studies and by Ursula K. see the closing idiom in Mandarin: 孤掌难鸣 meaning something like It's hard to clap with only one hand, or It takes two to tango. It looks easy, but it is not so comfortable, rather a process of prosthetization in which a very familiar part of the body becomes alien, sucked by the uncanny vortex of the machines, in which we believe to see a glimpse of creation, when two index fingers touch each others, but the triangulation ends up with a merging unity which is unsettlingly revealing. This is a drawing exercise, recording in real time my left hand and a white paper, the right hand was not holding a pencil but rather adjusting knobs and patching oscillators, of a Jones Raster Scan, similar to the Rutt Etra Scan Processor, but one of a kind built by Dave Jones for Sara Hornbacher and powered by Signal Culture. The video has been censored numerous times because the gatekeepers can’t figure out what they are seeing. The piece has been in numerous video festivals and museum shows including the ETC archive video collection. At WXXI we speeded up the ending and added a still frame to variation in the rhythm. The video was bathed in various shades of highly saturated pink. The keyers put various combination of keys putting one mouth inside of the other. For three to five minutes we blew kisses back and forth. The cameras were focused on close ups of Connie Coleman’s and Alan Powell’s mouth. The piece is constructed by an oscillator driving four B&W video cameras through a Jones video sequencer, Jones Keyer, and Jones colorizer. Quickly the computer crashed and we left to own devices to improvise with live cameras and analog synthesizers. Connie Coleman and I went that particular residency to completely focus on learning the computer interface to the Experimental Television Center analog video system. Hot Pink was produced in 1981 at the Experimental TV Center in Owego, NY and post produced at WXXI television the same year.
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