new normal is same old shit
HD video, 5:49 minno sound
english intertitles
I MET A NUDE FIGURE FROM DUCHAMP'S ÉTANT DONNÉS ON SEX CAMS
Work focusing on the modern representation of human body on webcams.
Bodies seeking experience in intimate participation through live streaming webcams formally repeat pieces of art that interest me: Courbet’s L'Origine du monde and Duchamp’s Étant donnés.
There is no sound in the work to confront the viewer with silence and make them aware of its presence. The intertitles with quotes from Jolanta Brach-Czaina’s book Szczeliny istnienia [Cracks in Existence] also refer to a silent film.
In one of the last scenes, the camera shows the point from which we got into the dark space (through the window on a laptop screen), equating it with the light of the cinema projector, which is to refer to the voyeuristic roots of visual culture. The body in the animation confronts the viewer with its subjectivity.
new normal is same old shit (2020) stills from the film. HD video, color, no sound, 5:49 min.
produced with support of Adam Mickiewicz Institute
The invisible may be hidden in gaps, cracks that lead within, underneath the surface, to the other side of reality. The same reality, though.
What is given?
Just you and me.
Or just me?
I
I can hear you breathing.
So you are more than anonymous eyes.
By looking we not only extract the observed reality, but also wake it up. It could seem that sight is merely a tool of observation, but in fact it also creates.
Given: Courbet’s pussy, nude figure from Duchamp’s tableau, Brigitte Bardot in the first scene of Le Mépris, your boss, a person with different political views, a person who would never perform in front of you because you’re a man, because you’re a woman, because they care, because they don’t care, because you don’t care, because you’re a coward, because you’re a fake, because what is real anyway? I also don’t have to be anyone in particular.
I can see now that the discussed problem reverses the perspective of Plato’s cave because – contrary to what Plato believed – we usually operate in the intense sunlight of brightness, among known and firm values, while lacking what remains in the crack, although there is no truth there as we are facing a mystery, there is no pure good since it does not exist where it cannot be separated from evil.
Immersion, however, poses a certain threat to individual existence. For in a state of complete permeation, confusion of the sides, mutual infiltration, it is difficult to determine what exists in what, what is the image and what is its background.
The frame I choose,
What I expose,
What I keep out of view,
The ways you can access the image
Give me control over my representation.
But my representation is just an echo,
But my representation is just an echo
Of Courbet’s pussy, the nude figure from Duchamp’s tableau, Brigitte Bardot in the first scene of Le Mépris, your boss, a person with different political views.
My body thus becomes the body of the world.
One might say we form something of a natural compound of the intimate and the universal form of existence. Our personal experience not only goes beyond ourselves, but also beyond human experience towards complete universality, towards complete existence, which we embody and point at with our individual presence.
The Old Masters’ drives are echoed in my drives.
Me
Be me
Be with me
Be with
Me
It’s easy to notice that each of us is a crack in reality. Not only for others but also for oneself. The world cracks in the place where we are.
And no matter if you call it immersion or illusion.
Contains quotations from Jolanta Brach-Czaina’s book Szczeliny istnienia [Cracks in Existence] from 1992.