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This selection illustrates how I build my work around experiments with language and storytelling, using video, performance, and object making. "Apogee," "Out There It's Not Just Fans, You Can Feel Real Wind," and "California Dreaming," were all completed, or started, in 2020.
"Apogee" a morse code adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit".
APOGEE- With this video installation, I continue my examination of language as central to our species' evolutionary trajectory. Each video channel shows a character in Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist one-act play: "No Exit." Speaking with individual morse code frequencies instead of voices, the characters remain synchronized, enacting the entire play. Each channel is a single take, 90 min long shot, where the actors were asked to open and close their mouths at precisely timed intervals. Silently sitting without moving or emoting, the performances eventually begin to take a toll on the actors' bodies, paralleling the type of torture that Sartre's characters endure in his version of hell as described in "No Exit." The four videos playback on flat screens installed portrait-like, each centered on a wall, facing off inside a black 11' x 11' room.
"Out There It's Not Just Fans, You Can Feel Real Wind"
This installation's title comes from a line in Terayama Shuji's play "Marie in Furs." A lot could be said about this avant-garde play. A fair reduction would suggest that at its core lies a discussion of the dramatic relationship between fiction and the real, the natural and the artificial. I set off to record my place in nature by walking as many miles as possible before exhaustion, at which point I fall into the landscape, holding the camera at arm's length. The frame is shaky; it moves to the rhythm of my breathing. I do not attempt to stabilize the shot. It is a portrait of the landscape from the point of view of my pulse. Making "Breath Taking Landscapes" videos has become intrinsic to my practice. An hour-long compilation of "Breath Taking Landscapes" is synchronized to "The Trying Carpet," a kinetic sculpture in flight during windy segments and at rest in quiet environments. An immersive soundscape emerges, blending fan motors' live sounds with the recorded ones of actual wind.
"California Dreaming" (online portion - work in progress)
Above is a series of screenshots from the website, http://www.collectivedreamworld.com
This online experience allows you to read the AI's dreams as a continuous narrative. With every click, a new page, a new sentence... A cadence emerges, reminiscent of how we might recount a dream to one another. Syncopated, in pieces.
Gioj De Marco CV - April 2021
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