I'm Not There
This film is linked with the work 'Where Am I'. Together, these films aim to reflect on how, as an artist, I have been spatially related to this research project.
The film I’m Not There uses video footage shot from my own computer monitor while, as a user, I was controlling a robot inside Tate Britain at night. This was possible because of the project that received TATE’s IK Prize[1] in 2014: After Darkby a collective called The Workers (Tommaso Lanza, Ross Cairns and David Di Duca). This project allowed people from anywhere in the world (as long as they had a good internet connection) to control a robot, with a camera and lights attached to it, inside TATE Britain’s galleries, during the night, at the same time that two curators were commenting on the works of art being shown by the cameras. There were four robots inside the galleries, and they were programmed not to meet each other. The event occurred in five summer nights, between the 13th and the 17th of August 2014. Besides the name of the film, the irony was also in the way the robot/camera was operated. There was no intention of looking at the artworks, the focus was on the place itself: the inside of a museum, with all the lights turned off. So, the robot was wandering around the gallery, looking at details of the floor, ceiling and walls, trying to hit something along the way. By doing this, at no point did the curators comment on the things I was showing.
The last note is related to two formal features of the films, which are intended to be elements of reflection not only on how we perceive these places – Asprela Campus and the museum space -, but also on how the author positions himself towards his research work. The first feature is the way the camera continuously, without cuts, moves on and off from close shots to wider ones, allowing for a broader contextualization and perspective on the subjects. The other is the confrontation between the high resolution with which Where Am I was filmed (ultra-HD, 3840x2160), against the low light, lack of sharpness and file compression issues of I’m Not There. The first work gives the viewers, among other things, a large amount of information to look at and to choose from, the other reduces its level, increasing the viewer’s effort to try and discern something from what they are seeing. Within the defined viewpoint of the camera’s eye, a polysemic approach is always an inherent intention of all the artworks.
[1] “The IK Prize is presented annually by Tate for an idea that uses digital technology to innovate the way we discover, explore and enjoy British art in the Tate collection.” (Tate, no date)
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Video 1920x1080 (full HD) with stereo sound, 13'17'' (full version)
