marginalia project

marginalia 0.3 - to kill a man and say bu-ba-baff

To kill a man and say BU-BA-BAFF from Marginalia Project on Vimeo.

Developed by the group, the project “to kill a man and say bu-ba-baff” intended to develop means of transposing the aesthetics of light painting to the medium of video, as previously cited.

We sought an alternative procedure of illuminating scenes that would allow: greater organicity of the luminous effect; the possibility of varying exposure of specific portions of an image; rhythm effects based on the greater of lesser speed of the movement of the torch; among other potentials.

Images of scenes illuminated by torch light were recorded on video and later treated on Adobe After Effects with the filters Luma Key and Echo.

In spite it was possible to achieve the first intentions of the project – that is to say: transpose the aesthetics of light painting to video associating movement to the static images – it was not possible to combine such images with performing actors or the movement of illuminated objects; an unresolved issue that we intend to analyze and develop soon.

margina 0.2 - video appropriations

Triangle - Nam June Paik*

The Korean artist Nam June Paik – initially graduated as a musician to then diversify his fields of interest in music, movies, video and television – was one of the firsts to deeply explore the video technology as expressive possibility, opening different pathways in this area and creating important zones for reflexion about the electronic image and its potentials.

For many years a member of Fluxus group, of George Maciunas, his performances, installations and ready-mades explored multidisciplinary fields from a provocative approach, deconstructing traditional elements of areas like music and innovating in the critical [or not so critical] use of yet incipient technologies, such like video and television.

Among his works, we could highlight the approximation between video and music, and, in particular, the

approximation of the piano and the TV set – both, in their own historical moment, the most expensive pieces of furniture found in a bourgeois home. These two devices were then targets of various interventions of the artist, that sought to produce new sound and visual effects through prepared pianos and TV sets - as he exhibited in one of his first great exhibitions: “Exposition of Music – Eletronic Television”, set up at the residence of the architect Rolf Jährling in 1963.

In this exposition, Paik presented works of fundamental interest to Marginalia Project, one of them named “Random Access Music”, in which sound devices (record players and tape recorders) had their reading units detached and offered to the manipulation of the visitors, that could use them to access parts of the recorded sound in the records and tapes in a random and unlinear way - producing themselves their own music by combining the sounds available.

Random Access Music - Nam June Paik

Somewhat through this approximation, many of Paik’s projects were made in an analogy of the simultaneity of sound production of musical instruments with a moving image context. This was one of the premises in his presentation of the Paik/Abe Synthesizer, that he developed together with the TV technician Shuya Abe. According to him, the video synthesizer they created should be manipulated in real-time, like a piano, to produce various plastic effects in the electronic image.

From this experiment forth, many of Paik’s experiments dealt with real-time image production, and, some of them, with closed circuit video systems that fed back themselves, creating a variety of trail and superposition effects. In this array of experiments, the live television show “Good Morning Mr. Orwell” really shows out. Done in the beginning of 1984, it was accomplished in live broadcasting from New York and Paris. In one of the sections of the show, a couple danced before a blue screen and, through chroma keying, the background was replaced by the feedback of the signal sent to Paris and then back to New York, creating the trail effect through the delay produced by the physical distance between the two cities. And that too was combined with numerous image and sound superposition of signals coming from different points of the globe, effectively accomplishing a work made in no specific geographical place.

Good Morning, Mr. Orwell - Nam June Paik

Paik’s approach to technology was frequently ambiguous, given the analogy he continuously proposed between technology and elements of eastern culture, such as Zen Buddhism – in association with musician John Cage. It’s interesting, however, his efforts to humanize the technological artifact, deconstructing its traditional uses in favor of producing different experiences and questioning the stable elements of its language and materiality.

It’s, many times, through these interventions that it is possible the insertion, among these artifacts, of elements before expelled from their constitution, allowing particular experiences of technological devices, as Paik does with “Random Access Music” and “Paik/Abe Synthesizer”, separating recorded music and video from a mechanical and linear reproduction so it may be physically and bodily appropriated by the artist or the public.

marginalia 0.2 - cinematographic appropriations

"Les Carabiniers" - Jean-Luc Godard

In the movie Les Carabiniers, of Godard, an emblematic sequence shows the protagonist in his first cinema screening. The images he sees: a series of references to historical images of a first cinema, along which a recreation of the Arrival of the train to the station, of Lumière brothers. In an explicit reference to the history of cinema, Godard emphasizes the counterpart of this invention [to cite Jean-Louis Commoli]: the spectator. Throughout the screening, the protagonist reacts directly to the images shown based on his naïve belief in the cinematographic device – already assimilated by the more experienced spectators.

He covers his face to the arrival of the train [as it is said to have happened in the Lumière screening]; tries to see the woman that undresses herself beyond the border of the screen by changing his position in the movie theater; when the bath scene comes, he jumps off from his seat and gets closer to the screen. Firstly he tries to see inside the bath tub to then start to touch and caress the image of the woman - her face, her legs – seeming start to understand the nature of the image. But then, trying to actually enter the image, he tears down the projection screen.

Marginalia Project seeks to explore this precise aspect of the relation between spectator and image, but through the construction of a specific device in which this desire of the spectator in relation to the image is incorporated to the projection itself. Beyond an illusion of virtual reality, the experiment proposed by the project centralizes the materiality of the image, that shall not be forgotten nor ignored by the spectator, but actually emphasized in a new form of interaction.

marginalia 0.2 - image experiences

Paik for Kids from André Mintz on Vimeo.

In the video Paik for Kids – made by André Mintz out of family archive – the electronic image theme is developed from the point of view of the spectator, in the figure of a child being presented by her dad to a TV set that displays the image of the child herself captured by the camera in real-time.

It’s not a direct antecessor of Marginalia Project, but a conceptual antecessor, that shows already the problematic with which the project relates to. The relation between body and image - between one’s self and its representation - in a gaze that seeks by the naivety the revelation of intrinsic characteristics of the materiality of the image. In a moment in which the video image – with its specific characteristics, such as its accessibility to a larger amateur public and its simultaneity – was also in its childhood, with the first explorations of its potentials.

By placing the camera framing the image itself produces, the system feeds back itself, multiplying the image it captures ad infinitum, like two mirrors facing each other. It’s a basic procedure of video – that was impossible in traditional cinema -, used in many works in this field, and that will also be used in marginalia. However, such procedure is quite different from the mirrors, since the body of the spectator is detached from the image formation, allowing her only to perceive it – as her movement does not make it possible to see anything beyond what the camera sees. The playing of getting into and out of the frame reveals the fragmentation produced by the camera, just as the similarities and distinctions between the body of the spectator and represented body – between the subjective point of view and the view of the self made objective.

Marginalia Project seeks an experience close to this childish one: an exploratory will without a predetermined objective beyond the knowledge offered by the process; in process. The idea as a product of experience; of the direct contact with the materiality from which it elaborates its own form and detonates new processes.

marginalia 0.1 - appropriations

Picasso - Gjon Mili

The long exposure with flashlight lighting is not a rare technique, being easily found photographic experiments in internet that make use of it, generally referred to as light painting or light scribbling (Flickr). However, there’s little systematic exploration of its aesthetics possibilities – beyond its basic forms – and little seeking for expanding, from its base, to a problematic it creates in photography field.

Even in the history of photography, there were only a few photographers that gave it a deeper approach, in such a way that there aren’t many photo icons of this technique. Possibly the most important and most known image is the portrait Gjon Mili made of Picasso in 1949, illustration of this post. This experiment clearly accomplishes, by the drawing made by the painter with the flashlight, a hybridism between the objective photographic record and the gesture trace of the drawing, but without going too far of the indexical aspect of photography through post-production. The flash, then, registers an instant of Picasso’s figure that coexists in the photogram with the image produced by his drawing process - way beyond the short instant. The gesture is inserted and one only photographic record is cohabitated by different temporalities.

Camera movement on flashlight - Harry Callahan

A little earlier, but still contemporaneous to Mili’s photo, Harry Callahan also worked with long exposition processes and, more frequently, of multiple exposure.

Nude - Evgen Bavcar

A similar case, the photographer Evgen Bavcar also uses this technique, but producing a different aesthetic. The long exposure makes Bavcar’s photos somewhat surrealistic and, for the visual deficiency of the photographer – blind since he was 12 -, it is quite often qualified as tactile, mixing the sight and the touch in the constitution of the image. In this case also, the gesture is incorporated beyond the pressing of the camera’s button and the photographic instant is distended and opened wide to the intervention of the photographer to the process itself.

marginalia 0.1 - photographic experiments

orage dans une tasse de thé - pedro veneroso

The first and main antecessor of Marginalia Project are the photos of one of its authors, Pedro Veneroso, produced with long an multiple exposure techniques.

The aesthetic accomplished by this technique – particularly known as light painting or light scribbling – guided some of the works developed individually and collectively by the authors and is currently the base for the development of Marginalia Project.

Basically, the photos are made with a long exposition interval in a dark environment, generally using a flashlight as lighting source. The use of multiple exposure also allows the superposition of distinct moments on the same photogram, with a change of set or of the position of the props, the camera or the photographer.

The combination of these techniques allows a wide variety of processes, such as drawing, montage and coloring, which are explored in different works.