VIDEO AGE 2022

There is an immense critical corpus on video art which details its subjects and concerns. We comment on personalities and themes, but much more rarely we address the question of video or animated image in the form of the discretization of time and space. That is to say in the form of sets of videogram unit images concatenated in order to produce a series of morphological and semantic correspondences producing meaning. The theoretical radicalism stripping the video of its affects and hagiographies makes it possible to approach the question in a mathematical form which recalls the informational, energetic and spatial nature of the sequences of images associated in more or less significant or more or less random sequences. This formal posture could appear sterile if the combinations that it generates were so immense… Indeed, freed from discourse, the videographer is thus free to find in the wealth of possible combinations unexpected interpretations which are as many possible worlds. The multitude of choices makes the author responsible for the line he has chosen. Far from abandoning the demands of the artist and the singularity of his vision, this method generates risks that are much more dizzying than the egotic immobility of the traditional author. Multiplicity engenders an incredible ontological risk, it is like leaning on the edge of the galaxy contemplating the millions of light years that submerge us and choosing a star among all.
This is how “Video Age” which was born from a previous editing experience called “Cage Suite” is an extension of a dream called “procedural editing”. An application coded with Processing combines images and sounds in a fascinating spectacle, perpetually renewed.

Alain Longuet, Gabriel Soucheyre, and myself have teamed up again to imagine a follow-up to the “Cage Suite” project in order to experiment with a new context for these images.

They could be shown in the places where they were taken in order to show the work of time and space. I could have taken similar shots to show the transformation of the environment. We have chosen a theoretical formalism and to manipulate these images as if they had been a collection of numerical spaces related to n-degree functions. This is how the images slide over each other and cause unexpected correspondences. The images accumulate, causing improbable bijections, shaking up temporalities in the waking dream of all possible worlds. The composer Jacques Emmanuel Rousselon joined the experience by bringing an open and inventive music.

Stéphane Trois Carrés 2015 / 2022