EIGHT POINT O ONE

PRESSEMELDING:

EIGHT POINT O ONE

Eirin Støen

17.08.12 - 19.08.12

Opening: Friday 17.08.12, 20.00 - 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays

When you relocate your body to unfamiliar sceneries the most familiar things might be refreshed, or dare I say reloaded. One restores the curiosity that has been numbed by overexposure in daily life. Finding something new in something new is easy, it's when you relocate your curiosity to the familiar the tactonical plates starts shifting. The most tantalizing in recording moving image is that it's not based on work, but on patience and practice, up until the moment occurs where one has to use all ones abilities to transfer the instant into annals. Intimacy is for some reason one of the most problematic things to transfer into crative matter. Might be so because it's hard to abstract, and is very often based on recognition, and so seemingly belongs to a lower cast in culture. Not giving the break from reality or a regenerating freshness, it's condemned to gain recognition with the proletarian and uncomplex, rather than the burgois or the academic. Honest efforts of concealing a hidden truth behind reality often leads to straining stagnation. If you choose to be subjective you are forcing your audience to be subjective too, and open to attack, even though your effort has been done in the utmost innocence and seriousness. Well, I've got news for you. Everything is subjective, the question is how trained you are in concealing your subject, and undermining your own voice, which is your output and receptory processing of what you perceive through your five senses into memory.


Out of the two hours you spend in a movie theater, you spend one of them in the dark. Or you used to, before digital technology became available. With todays technology we have a new opportunity to drag the most personal experiences, on pure hunch, into the ccd. We're even able to create cinema-like images without effort. This might lead to an aggrandizement of images, where everything goes, because the motive is the only thing that matters. Photographers who are interested in authenticity should not be worried about these consequences, because how you see is of as much importance as what you see, and frame. This is not a defense of craft or skill. The blurred and the obscured technique might be as effective, well proven by the Dogma movement in the nineties, underlining the legitimate with seemingly poor skills and equipment, and so convincing the audience that what they see is in fact real. Quality in an image is always in conflict with the modern minds perception of what is real, cause we're still convinced you need at least a camera the size of an AK-47 to retrieve a moving image of character and virtue. In this transition, where we are stuck between nostalgia, trash and cinematic manipulation, one needs to take a stand quite similar to the choice between acrylic or oil painting, or concocting sculptures with bronze or clay. Choices seemingly unimportant for the ignorant audience, but essential to the artist. Not only because of the end result of the piece, or what the ingredients symbolizes, but even more so the resistance in the media.


What one has to be aware of is the contemporary minds ability (on a subconscious level) to reveal the manipulative efforts done by the filmmaker, in framing, exposure, selective focus, camera movements or editing. A dishonest image will be unfolded on some level by any viewer, no matter how much strain the artist goes through to conceal it. What one can do, as a bulletproof method, is to be totally honest in the process, and work on the border of ones abilities. Then none of the above concerns will even matter, and the space to criticize the image will narrow down to a minimum. This goes for all creation, but especially filmmaking, cause the mind is both used to and tired of being manipulated by a moving image. By suppressing your skills you will gain the same effect as a novice attempting to be more virtuous than he is. We have to work on the mesa we belong at in the moment when we're producing, to generate effortless but with the utmost of our ability, and nothing else matters.


When I'm calm I can hear my heart beating. Can one transfer a beating heart to the screen? If one has the ambition of fabricating a dreamy documentary, one has to follow a path into a dreamy landscape. Quite recently a friend told me he shot some images with his compact HD camera of his illusions on L.S.D. He was totally convinced the illusions would be caught by the sensor of his camera. They were gone when he looked at the imagery some days later, but the background made him able to regenerate the illusions post intoxication, in the ccd of his perception. Probably because of the authentic attempt, maybe some of his perceptions transformation of imagery might be visible to the audience when screened later, if only small traces. When the picture is enough it is enough. If one has the ambitions of recording the world with the utmost purity and honesty, underlining the subjective truth, one has to be willing to go through a process of naïveté, a step back to regenerate a fascination for what is already known to all of us. What defines the qualities of the conclusion is how one is able to catch what is present without being concerned of the receptory judgment of a given future audience. In that sense one must entreat from oneself the impervious, and such remove the layers of experience bringing to light the sober curiosity of early memory. Cause genius is the recovery of childhood at will, but of course you already knew that. I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. - Chris Marker (29 July 1921 - 29 July 2012.) Everyone now and then needs to be reminded. A good enought reason to travel, just to miss what is amiss, or know what you already knew. To touch the origins of self.

Kristian Skylstad 2012

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