The Video Image — Suspension of the Real (Nothing at all)

THE VIDEO IMAGE — SUSPENSION OF THE REAL (Nothing at all) is an artistic project that attempts to act within a system that is both close and distant: the academic system.

By being required to fill a space, even an empty one, artistic practice runs the risk of being itself closed off from the outside world. Thus the work — as well as the very language — had to be completely emptied before even starting to build it, to finally reach nothing at all, a form of abyss to which only an act of destruction could lead. In the middle of this process, even that which appeared most solid also ended up shattered: word, image, sound and time.

In the midst of the wreckage, the video image became closer to other images, particularly those images from film that have always been near a state of collapse or, one might say, suspension. The work immersed itself in texts found along the way, in characters of stories and especially in reality itself (narrated through the mathematics of numbers and through the grammar of words and of images) and there, in the real, in the meanderings of its events, it found a time of its own which took over everything.

This is how the work was carried out: alone or arrested by something larger.

This immersion into reality occurred at a speed not always visible to the naked eye: various machines (cameras with clocks) and other similar apparatus were needed to arrest time, albeit provisionally.

At other moments a more attentive eye was needed to be able to listen to the images or, to put it another way, multiple eyes, multiple perspectivations of the vision, multiple cameras were needed; and also a further vision, almost stationary but also suspended and made of minimal and imperceptible manoeuvres, which, sometimes enlarged, other times reduced to nothing, were used to build a narrative.

In short, the images, words and sounds (the language) are themselves apparatus to be used and then returned to reality. This back and forth, this ambiguous positioning, in which true reality and another reality, less truthful, are combined in a single vehicle, brought forth this work which forgot where it wanted to go.

The images represent themselves, the words refer to themselves, the sounds are what they are, as written in the title: THE VIDEO IMAGE — SUSPENSION OF THE REAL (Nothing at all).

Author(s)
Year 2011
Type Thesis
Institution Universidade do Porto
Degree PhD
Supervisor(s) José Manuel Bártolo
Language Português
Field Art and Design