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2018, Filmed and edited using both analog and digital media

 

It is no longer possible to imagine our current world without video as a means of conveying information. In the news we see people at war, people fleeing, people dying. We trust visual and audio material even more than words and writing. If we then watch the broadcast of a political speech the next day and hear that that war, that fleeing and that dying calls for increased state control to protect citizens, we are ready to believe in it. But why? Image manipulation is almost as old as photography itself and nowadays we are already able to render simulations that are indistinguishable from or even surpass a real shot. The current proliferation of "fake news" and "alternative facts" makes it clear that channels created to inform us are increasingly being misused as tools of manipulation. So we have to ask ourselves how much truth can be communicated through our media at all and what truth is inherent in the medium itself - what characteristics it has.

To investigate this, we dealt with interference in sound and image as part of our project. Imitating the layered mechanism of an interference, where the medium overlays the original information, we first created raw material with the help of a VHS camcorder as the basis of our manipulations. The image content is oriented towards random terms "man", "garden" and "walking", whereby the "garden", as a symbol of nature, is materialized in the form of a forest.


We tell the story of two people moving within this forest. Three times an unknown person can be seen. The observer filming does not show himself. The video deals with the relationship between them two, the latter being indistinguishable from the camera to the viewer. With each encounter, the protagonists are closer to each other and the image disturbances keep increasing; they seem to be triggered by these encounters or they are their cause. Whether the two protagonists' approximation culminates in them touching remains open. Instead, we find ourselves transported back to the starting point before the image collapses completely. The battery is dead.

 

The image distortions shown are an interplay of the properties of all the processing levels that the raw recordings went through on the way to the finished video. The different file formats have left their individual fingerprints, so to speak. The first transformation of the filmed material takes place during the encoding of the tape, which stores the light and colour values. We then manipulated this tape with a magnet, created disturbances and then filmed them from the camera's display. Through this act of alienation, we finally translated the information of the filmed outside world from the causal-analogue into the digital possibility space of ones and zeros. In a final step, we deleted various sections from the source code of the recordings. The various programmes, in turn, reacted very differently to the missing sections. They interpreted them as streaks, gaps or colour shifts, if they did not even repair the defect on their own.

 

The sound of the original recordings was lost by filming the display. Instead, we backed the recordings with distorted interference. Their shrill artificiality builds up increasingly and overlays the initially natural sound atmosphere.

 

So what are the properties of our medium? Our experiment gives you all the answers at once. The result is a confusion of voices and noises. Contexts of meaning can no longer be discerned. Only the fictional part remains. Perhaps the best quality of the video is that it does not try to make us believe that it is telling the truth.

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