I’m watching the take off on live video. I’m on the plane. I’m in my seat. There’s a monitor on the bulkhead. I look at the monitor and the plane is taking off. I look out the window and the plane is taking off. Then what. The plane is taking off outside the cabin; the plane is taking off inside the cabin. I look at the monitor, I look at the earth.

Michael Majeski, in Don DeLillo’s play in two acts Valparaíso, 2000

A few days before Martí Peran commissioned a text from me on the videoart scene in São Paulo, I was ready to depart to Barcelona, the curator’s hometown. The trip was the time I had to research and think about a possible take to such a demand. Suddenly, I realized I was in Europe looking for references in the literature in Portuguese and English I had brought along in my heavy backpack. The transit gave me an uneasy feeling of schizo-claustrophobia, for, despite the large geographic and literary dislocations, I felt arrested in a strongly delimited space of infinite possibilities of approach.

I decided I would spend a few hours a day at the Cathedral at the Casc Antic neighbourhood to read and contemplate my thoughts. On my first visit there, however, it occurred to me that the ways with which one constructs meaning out of the narrative proposed by the church’s informational program – the architecture, paintings, sculptures, furniture design, altarpiece and shrine, sound (the sermons, the organ, the echoes)  - alluded to the fashion of the videoworks I had already contemplated to write about more so than the literature.

It is then a matter of space. The intention is not to further exhaust the excessive problematization of art “spaces”, but to particularize it here. There are three coordinates to be covered: one of geographic location, São Paulo; another of a site of artistic practice, which I’ll call for now ‘videoart’; and finally the place of the text. This text, which will contain a set of discussions on video-works by six artists in close proximity to the author (because they live in or transit through the same city), is also contained within its own limits of writing. Perhaps it is a space of undefined structures because of its resistance to constraint and specificities.

A large city such as São Paulo is in a constant process of swelling and contracting; it is constantly shifting. There are many ‘worlds’ contained there and each one, for instance, the ‘art world’ is also in a process of creative, institutional and market intensification, which makes the practice of ‘mapping’ a particular art scene within it improbable. Such a practice is fundamentally exclusivist and insufficient, especially if attempted to do so through writing a set number of words with the aid of a few illustrations in 300 dpi.

In the case of video, it makes it far more difficult because, to begin with, we can only work with a resolution of 72 dpi, not to mention the fact that ‘videoart’ can no longer be withheld as an isolated artistic category. There was a time when works in video corresponded to a more marginal practice of artistic signification and forced their way into the art institutional realm through a discursive exercise of legitimacy. But, perhaps for the first time, we saw emerge a genre that mutated as fast as its technological supports, and the medium’s vigorous and dynamic imprint on the social fabric as a whole yielded out a multiple, unstable, variable and complex language even before it learned how to pronounce its own name. Our known mechanisms of classification and categorization have become obsolete.

Nowadays, the videographic image is everywhere. It can be present in multimedia installations, in dark rooms in single channel, in electronic sculptures and performances; it is integrated into theatre and dance, into sports, political campaigns, scientific investigation; its varied supports can be used as a tool for surveillance, spying, and even as a means of distribution (via internet and peer to peer) of films and TV shows.  The production and dissemination of video is no longer only in the hands of the videoartists of the 90’s, it is in the hands of everyone. As artists Lucas Bambozzi and Cao Guimarães have put it, this “octopus phagocyte of the arts has been absorbing and transforming with its multiple tentacles all the anterior (and perhaps posterior) artistic manifestations since the end of the past century.”

It seems that the points of convergences, interferences, juxtapositions and transversalities wherein the videographic image is constructed have allowed the use of its apparatuses by artists to be a set of conceptual tools for artistic creation. The technique only matters to the extent that it refers to something beyond itself, without which it cannot be justified. As a conceptual tool, the image is no longer a representation of the recorded thing, but a metonym of a process of thinking. The metonym, as a figure of speech, is the incorporation of space into the poetic structure. Its definition, the part taken as the whole, is the mechanism with which the artists presented here approach the audiovisual thinking, which is a spatial way of thinking (in the catholic belief, the medieval church is not a representation of heaven; it is an evocation of Heavenly Jerusalem). Some of the works discussed here are signed by artists who do not necessarily work with video alone – who are not under the rubric of ‘videoart’ – but who use it conceptually as means of construction of audiovisualities. Sight is the sense of the eye; visibility is the sense of the eye and the ear combined and performed from a specific point in space.

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Raquel Garbelotti based her research for building Cinemaquette (2008) on Godard’s saying that “doing is to dare to know where you are, where you come from; it is to know your place in the process of production in order to, afterwards, go someplace else.” The installation is composed of two eight-inch screen DVD players contained in a small architectural structure, which mimics a movie theatre with two separate screening rooms but with an aperture in the ‘wall’ that divides them.

One room displays Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and the other shows an excerpt of Godard’s film Notre Musique in which the director lectures an audience on a type of editing sequence called shot/countershot (campo e contra campo). When watching one film, the spectator inevitably - though subtly - absorbs the content of the other that continually ‘slips’ through the aperture. This slippage also occurs on a linguistic level, since Godard’s film works within a certain field of discussion (cinema, documentary, fiction) while Smithson’s discloses a discursive field (Land Art).

Garbelotti created a spatial and semantic device that functions as a metastructure of the editing suite, for a third film is created in the mind of the viewer. This is to say that it is not only a matter of apprehending the work intellectually or interacting with the artist’s proposal. Here, the mind of the viewer concludes the architecture of Cinemaquette; it is the site where this film gets ‘screened’. Contrary to the limitations of pre-established ways to work with images dictated by the software, the mind is this someplace else where the artist’s work privately takes form.

In Boxing the Game: 4 video-installations with practical solutions for your emotional rescue (2008), Eder Santos also ‘misplaces’ the technology in order to construct four series of audiovisual objects. The artist literally arrests the projected image into aquariums, cages, music boxes and shrines. The video content is not in the foreground; it is subdued by the adornments of the objects that frame it.

For instance, the Three Shrines series, one of the installations in Boxing the Game, is composed of baroque-like shrines. The first, entitled “La Vergine in Orazzione”, contains a portrait of the artist’s mother overlapped with a naked female figure trying to escape from the image frame, which clearly refers to the role of women in Western society. The second, “Flashlight & Soul”, depicts an actor posing as Saint Sebastian as homage to Santos’ uncle Sebastian, who died as a victim of AIDS. The artist interlocks the idea of sacrifice, homophobia and the impossibility to perform one’s sexuality freely due to social and moral constraints. Finally, “Me, My Saint and I” includes a live camera that captures the image of the viewer and projects it into the third shrine, which grants him/her an aspect of a holy figure. 

It is a game of refraction. The viewer is captured into the patriarchal logic and religious morale enforced during the colonial times. The artist is already there, for he constructs these spaces through the use of his own memories and experiences. The personal refracts the historical - and vice versa - in a play of imprisoning and releasing the knowledge of the epistemological violence particular to the Baroque period. Boxing this game unveils its mechanisms of persistence.

When asked about what could be a proper use of technology in works of contemporary art, Santos promptly responds: “in a way that it does not use you, but that you make a conscious use of it. Technological instruments are a kind of ‘ready-mades’ formatted within a set of cultural and ideological inbuilt that is not ours. They were not invented here…I place the projected image in a box, where it can hardly be seen. I try to make an ‘incorrect’ use of these machines in order to be able to expand their purposes and localize them in other fields of signification.”

Instead of making an innovative use of current technology in order to construct other means of signification in artistic thought, Rodrigo Matheus makes a ‘proper’ use of digital technology that coins an innovative way to create audiovisual works. At a first glimpse, his video Tokyo (2008) looks like a carefully drafted abstract computer animation. But as the Google Earth camera slowly zooms out at the click of a mouse, we gradually start to see the shape of a city. For a few more minutes, we are still under the impression that the work might be a stylized aerial shot of Tokyo (in)formed by bits and algorithms sent through a satellite. However, as the zoom out progresses, what we see are corporate icons popping up on the screen to the point of covering that geography almost entirely. 

The euphoric promises of new ways to produce and disseminate knowledge intrinsic to the advent of the informational age appear here severely mapped by large global corporations. What began looking like fiction results in a kind of document on the level of privatization of knowledge ‘designed’ by corporate ideology and commercial interests.

The use of this particular tool to generate Tokyo assures a powerful documentary in the sense that, due to the visibly programmed (software generated) view (image) of a given ‘reality’, it neutralizes the dichotomy ‘real versus fiction’ that haunts the production of documentaries. Tokyo can be both an entirely fictional Tokyo and an entirely real depiction of the globalized corporate world.

In the feature length documentaries by Inês Cardoso and Laura Faerman, the artists overtly work within the fictional space in order to document their subject matter. Cardoso departs from fiction in Cocais: the reinvented town (2008) while Faerman saw the need to include it through technical and special effects in DAAN DAAN (2009).

Inês Cardoso documents the city of Cocais, which does not exist. Cocais was a town in the São Paulo state up until the 70’s, when the Ministry of Health’s public programme of mental health established it as an open-air psychiatric asylum. But since the year 2000, the government began to dismantle such units.

Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible City, Cocais explores the imaginative potentialities of a town as a means to recover itself from erased memories. From 2003 through 2004, together with the inhabitants/patients, Cardoso initiated a series of public events, which included the creation of a school of samba, a fashion show, a dinner party in the town square, a ball and the reactivation of the movie theatre, where the artist used to screen to the population the visual material they had created together.

The film’s last scene depicts the patients spending the night outdoors. They are lying down on their beds, which were carefully arranged on the public square. Some sleep, some don’t. Suddenly, dozens of sheep march into the square, slowly entering the picture frame. The text that concludes the film reads: “For a year I visited the community of Cocais.  Together, we held parties, meetings, dinners and projections at the Cine Cocais. This is the story of a town that reinvented itself around a movie, or the story of a movie that was invented by a town."

Cocais is interstitial. The last action portrayed recalls a surrialist dream, almost as if artist and inhabitants collectively decided that the boundaries that frame this interstice are not the ‘real’ and the ‘invented’. What the camera is actually capturing is the imaginable and the memories of lived experiences. Some of the patients featured in the film have died, the cinema is no longer operating; there are no more balls and the town is still called Casa Branca Reability Centre.

Laura Faerman’s video-documentary DAAN DAAN (2009) deals with the phenomenon of the cosplay in Brazil. Cosplay (short for ‘costume play’) is a type of performing arts whose participants outfit themselves as specific characters sourced out of the Japanese and East Asian media. With carefully elaborate costumes and accessories, participants emulate personages from video-games, manga, anime, tokusatsu, graphic novels, comic books, fantasy movies, amongst others. The cosplayers form a subculture centred on wearing their costumes and re-enacting scenes or inventing likely behaviour inspired by their chosen character.

The cosplay performance is about perfection and accurateness. Faerman used a HD full camera in the documentary, which revealed minor flaws on the make up, skin and mends on the costumes. Faced with an ethical drawback – since at the core of the subject matter she was dealing with was an issue of precision – the artist placed a number of filters and lenses on the camera in order to do justice to the performance she was eager to document. Each lens and each filter functioned as a separating device between the director and the subjects in her video. The voice of the author began to echo from a distance.

Despite the strong presence of Japanese culture in the country (Brazil has the largest Japanese community outside of Japan), linguistic, geographic, and historical barriers convinced Faerman of the impossibility to display an accurate observation of such a complex phenomenon. 

The video makes an excessive use of chroma key. Some frames are filled with animation showing Change Robot invading Brasília, for instance, or are just left plain green behind an ikebana lesson. Left ‘incomplete’ or highly fictionalized, the video is not so much ‘about’ this aspect of Japanese pop culture interchanged with Brazilian youth culture, it is ‘in’ it. The work undermines representation to the extent that it performs the fictional aspects inherent to the act of cosplaying.

By means of conclusion, Butter Architecture (2008) the large video-installation in 3 channels by Jorge Menna Barreto destabilizes and frustrates the notions of specificity. The three projections show different angles of the same scene. The artist suggests scenes from the everyday life by placing miniature figures – those used in architectural maquettes – onto blocks of butter.

They talk, walk, and rest on a bench. Light dictates the scene and we notice that the characters are not the subjects of the unfolding of the narrative. The classical composition of a background framing the actions being played out by the characters is dismantled. The structure of the scene melts inadvertently. The 60-minute single shot discloses a slow and dramatic narrative as the specificity of the site - the butter architecture - begins to swallow the subjects or throw them off high and steep slopes. The grease will engulf even the chroma key behind the unsteady structure.

Lucas Bambozzi and Cao Guimarães in the curatorial statement for Container Art. http://www.containerart.com.br/ContainerArtSP.pdf

 Jean-Claude Bernardet, O Autor no Cinema. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense/Edusp, 1994. p. 56

 Christopher Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd) p. 8

 I kindly ask the English reader to bear in mind the term in Portuguese for the discussion on Garbelotti’s work in order to explicit the connection between the two chosen films for the installation. The word ‘campo’ also means ‘field’ in English.

  HYPERLINK "http://estudio11.blogspot.com" http://estudio11.blogspot.com. For an interesting discussion on software as ideology, see Alexander R. Galloway’s “Language Wants To Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology” available at the online Journal of Visual Culture, 2006; 5; 315. http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/315