or
…“A dialogue with myself during the creation of the piece…”
Ana Boa-Ventura (Convergent Media program, UT- RTF Department)
1. Why bar codes and skin?
Bar
code readers have always fascinated me. I guess because I consider indexes to
be such a mesmerizing thing. Someone holds this metal gadget, drags it over my
object of consumption and I find out if I may or may not “possess”
this thing or how financially “painful” it will be to own it.
Truth, nakedness, commodification, desire, consumption, beams…. and skin.
What
it… every little inch of my skin was a sort of an index to something,
someone or some time? How to design this?
2. Where is the mapping?
One
of Jorge Luis Borges’ story would be later picked up by Umberto Eco as
the perfect example of the useless map: Borges describes a land where its
residents wanted so much detail in a map that the result was a coincidence
between the latter and the land… 1:1 scale… the topographic map
taken to its extreme… representation = represented object…
What if the map was less
of a model of the original “thing” and more of an index?…
The original thing being
me with all my memories, traumas, psychoses, phobias but also with purely
visual perceptions (mental imagery?) too beautiful to describe, lasting only
for a glimpse.
The index
being…hmmm… How can I represent memories that are too ephemeral,
too intimate to be described, without “un-beautifying” them?
Anything would be un-beautifying…
So
why not go the whole way through and make a pun? Any attempt to create an
interface that maps memories WILL BE CLUMSY. But I will do it anyway! And it will convey physicality,
nevertheless… My indexes will be portions of my “skin surface”,
and I will label them through bar codes.
Each
bar code will trigger a video sequence. Each video piece is somehow attached to
a lived experience: movies that I saw, images that were engraved in my memory. How
will I map these memories?.. Let me
see… On the most sensual parts of my body? The ones that easily exhale
odors because they’re more irrigated by blood vessels: I’m thinking
of the areas where we place perfume. There’s a fetishist, lustful, base
associated with this somewhat scientific body mapping that I want to explore.
3. Some basic ideas
The
feeling of my wrist doesn’t remind me of the same thing over and over. My
index system should express this: if I drag the bar code reader once over my
thighs, I think of black stockings against Lisa’s white legs in Cabaret:
I state “b/w contrast” as text on the screen and I set off the
sequence. I drag it a second time… Now, I think of the anthropomorphic
look of a pair of tweezers … I state “to envelop, encircle,
enclose” as text on the screen and the sequence is taken from “The
Unbearable Lightness of Being”, when Thomas gets his warm “leg
hug” from his lover.
Classic
white text on black background type can have troubling content…
English
is such a harsh language compared to others such as my own… In
Portuguese, such as in any Romanic-based language, ambiguity is key for
communication… Still, I want to push the boundaries of that
harshness… “men felt hat”: “felt, manly?”
“mainly felt men?”…
4. The “hard” part
I
will be using an IBS-reader, which is a keyboard interfaced bar code reader.
The
problems I face with the hardware part are several and huge. Just to mention
one: I need to be able to trigger different video sequences by having some kind
of a consistent interface on my desktop while these happen… I have to
research further and experiment with the hardware.
In
the following description by the manufacturer, the words I emphasize struck me
as having a direct relationship to what I want to express: touch and metal
trigger (mental) imagery..
“Whn
you use a Wand, hold it as you
would hold a pencil and draw a line across the bar code label smoothly, to let the optical sensor in the wand pick up the
bars and spaces. The stainless
steel case and the replaceable sapphire
tip make it very durable.”
5. An on-going project…
How
am I envisioning to further develop this project?
6. Some of the work I’m looking at:
Jose
Luis Guerin
Catalan
movie director of “Tren de sombras” (“Train of
Shadows”), presented at Cannes 1997.
The
title: comes from Maxim Gorky: "It isn't life, but its shadow, it isn't
movement, but its silent ghost... This, too, is a train of shadows."
The
“laison”with my project: Guerin’s film is all about an
attempt to rebuild a lost memory from the very material (film) left by Fleury,
a French amateur director that the memories refer to. Fleury died during the
vacations he was documenting, leaving a large archive of film, for Guerin to
assign “meaning” to.
Perry
Hoberman
I
quote from his web site: Hoberman’s Bar Code Hotel is “an
interactive installation for multiple participants (or guests). By covering an
entire room with printed bar code symbols, an environment is created in which
every surface becomes a responsive membrane…”
7. Many thanks to:
Sandy
Stone &
Samantha
Krukowski
for giving me a pair of wings (metaphorically). I’m honored to be part of your Convergent Media program (UT)! These are exciting times.
Rachel
Collier
for giving me a pair of wings (literally!)
Stephen
Dixon (Univ. of Salford, UK) &
Magnus
Helander (“Reference”, Stockholm)
for their inspiration during 98 SAGA’s workshop in Munich and their hints for the tech part