Календар

Game_Desire

Video Installation Project by Andrei Koltchanov

Origin

New York City…..Every day, for three to four years a high zoom lens camera, set up in the window of a major American financial corporation’s headquarters recorded the daily lives of women living in the buildings across the street. Sometimes operated manually, and often left unattended for hours at a time, the camera captured the women in the intimacy of their daily routines: getting up in the morning, taking  showers, eating, sleeping, having sex, talking on the phone, reading and more. The original footage, found in the company’s premises, runs for 65 hours and consists of 29 videotapes.  This extraordinary visual archive serves as the basis for Andrei Koltchanov’s video installation Game_Desire.

Concept

On the surface, Windows is a commentary on the boundaries between private and public, secret and spectacle, self and other. They have been significantly revised. The past decade has seen an extraordinary explosion of the private into the public realm: the Internet, tele/video-conferencing, security/surveillance systems, video and recording devices. Virtually anyone now has unrestrained remote access to places and spheres previously hidden from sight. Scoptophilia, commonly defined as an obsession with looking, has reached global proportions, as is the case with the phenomenal popularity of such TV shows as “Survivor” (US), “Big Brother” (EU), “Glass House” (Chile), “Behind the Glass” (Russia), “The Last Hero” (Brazil) all of which put forward transparency as the necessary condition of seeing. The entertainment industry in general has become increasingly reliant on the viewer’s desire to unveil, disclose and open up, to be granted the effect of unmediated and unrestricted presence of the intensity of the “real”. Advertising campaigns which appropriate the visual vocabulary of pornography as well as sensation-driven news reporting are also a part of the process: their effect largely depends on the degree of transparency which they offer to those who are watching.
It brings to question of whether transparency is a universal and democratic right.  It is the privilege of those in the position of technological, financial and informational power and thus is strongly allied with an imperial mode of thinking. The strength and the power of the empire are often premised on the degree of transparency of its subjects, and are used to exercise surveillance, assert domination and ensure control. It is no accident that Game_Desire was filmed from the window of a major American financial corporation. The look of the camera coincides with the look of power.

On another level, Game_Desire portrays  voyeurism, the desire of people of opposite sex to observe each other. The men, who produced the library of tapes over a period of three to four years, were obviously devoted to the process.  Risking their jobs, they consistently kept filming. Over the years they learned about the time when the women would wake up, and got to know the layouts of their apartments. They had to keep it secret, and they had to hide the archive.  This is not to say that only men engage themselves into voyeuristic practices. In the same footage, viewers will see powerful telescopes on tripods set up at the windows of the apartments of the same women that they were taping, pointing down to the buildings across Central Park.

This archive of videotapes documents a non-rational desire. Quite a few people in the 20th century   worked on voyeurism in filmmaking: Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window), Michael Powell (Peeping Tom), Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up), Krzysztof Kieslowski (A Short Film about Love) etc., but unlike a movie this material does not have a story or an arrangement for the perception. It is authentic. It has no mistakes.  Taken in its original form, as a voyeuristic collection of videotapes, in the form of “looking for,” and broken down to a constructive form of  “looking at,” the material becomes a powerful and provocative portrait of Desire. In the installation the images remain unedited, the choice of scenes is made for multiple projection purposes.
   
Game_Desire acknowledges the ambiguity of relations between entertainment, obscurity and transparency, secrecy and surveillance. It directly confronts the contemporary state of confusion regarding notions of privacy and puts the viewer in the position to experience the pleasures and the discomforts of looking at something that is  “not supposed” to be seen.

За пiдтримки

Samsung

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