Videodrome
3.
We are inside the work of art now. I am remembering helping make the work about memory and telling it to you. This is the magic of video. This is the magic of words.
This man I know, recently his car was broken into. Some things were stolen. The next day, he was able to watch the theft from the perspective of the security camera overlooking his work parking lot. Fixed perspective, slightly out of focus. A black blob of a man somehow wedges open the passenger door of the white pickup truck.
The passivity of the camera. It doesn't even autofocus. It records what it can. It perceives what it is physically able to perceive.
Arnheim's Visual Thinking. Some people can only see what is represented in the picture before them. If they learn how to see they can recognize and name negative space, the play of figure and ground, the rub of friction between colors.
If they learn how to see.
4.
Autofocus, the camera in autofocus, the camera blowing up their images in autofocus, the autofocus of the other's gaze.
Autofocus, people watching but not seeing, people letting the subject fall out of focus, return to focus, the audience is seeing but the camera and its projection are another audience, an audience within the piece, projecting its perceptions into another area of the piece.
5.
The pair of dancers representing the inner relationship of self to self.
The pair of dancers representing self & other (I/thou and its complications, the difficulty of even naming the I/thou relationship in a culture that orients to individualism and individual responsibility constantly) ---
They dance alternately machinelike and doll-like. They switch between stillness and motion abruptly. When dancing closely they express the confusion with the body and consciousness - is this my body, is this her body, is this doll-body my body, is it her doll-body --- dancing together, in argument, collapsing against self, self-doubt/argument ...
... women in the dressing room of a department store ...
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