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vid-e-o adj. 1. Of relating to television, esp. televised images. 2. Of videotape equipament and technology. _n., pl.-os. 1. The visual portion of a televised broadcast. 2. Television. 3. A vidocassete or videotape. [Lat. video, see < videre, see. See weid].
Videre is a video, not an installation, even though it has been conceived in order to take advantage of the space (the voyeurism of the camera's lens on the wall) and of the visitors' bodies (who adapt themselves to this Procustus's bed).
While technologies of image recording and alteration have been extremely developed, the social rituals of watching a video have crystallized in conventions. Videre focuses precisely on this less questioned point.
The ergonomics of watching is not self-evident; indeed, it is a heritage of 500 years of painting representation. The rectangle screen repeats the Renaissance window to another world ( which is a magic double). The immersion into the painting or video also means the withdrawing from life.
Vision - the sense this tradition has most emphasized - is also the most intellectual sense. This is because the eye has more control of the inputs from the world and can perceive at a distance (and not by contact).
My video embodies the act of seeing. It is a one-to-one experience. At the same time, the viewer creates a situation of exclusion of the other visitors and becomes something to be watched.
The viewer is in the hypothetical place from which the artist is supposed to frame the world. But it is not a true repetition of the artist's act, for the artist was in front of the camera's lens when he recorded the images - he had never been in the position the viewer occupies at present. The empty place in front of the viewfinder was waiting for the viewer.
The artist creates an engaging blind flirt and the inherent voyeurism becomes a two-way route.WITHOUT TITLE (VIDERE)
Technical aspects inherent to the video production are not taken as choices or virtuosi's demonstrations of handicraft, but rather as the result of the artist's direct physical contact with the camera.
Composition, framing and focus, for instance, are only a secondary and unpredictable response to the experience of getting the lens closer and further.
This is a metaphor to the various degrees of closeness and separation between the watching eye and the filming eye.
Videre is the impossibility of plunging. It is the concentration on the magic skin of the image.