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Looking through a set of stereoscopic binoculars, a single viewer explores high-resolution panoramic images. Placed in the centre of an exhibiting room equipped with a screen, the binoculars are attached to the end of a balancing pole, so as to follow the movements of the viewer’s body. The image resulting from the viewer’ navigation is projected on the large screen that adorns one of the gallery walls. The choices made by the person in charge of the binoculars — whatever part of the landscape she chooses to look at or move across — are thus witnessed by the rest of the gallery visitors. Both the viewer, and what she sees can therefore, in turn, be observed. Similarly, the sound-track that accompanies the selected images is heard by all present.

The user of the device is given an option: she may choose to navigate the space of a vast library or she can explore a seaside landscape, both punctuated by discreet video presences of the artist reading excerpts of books. The viewer discovers the embedded videos – small windows of moving images inserted within the still panoramic photograph – while surveying the 360 degrees’ view of the library or of the Ipanema beach. By pressing one of the device’s buttons, she can then zoom into the video, expanding it to full screen and simultaneously setting off the sound of the artist’s voice.

Parente’s work calls to mind Bellour’s classic notion of Entre-images not merely because of the installation’s combination of photography and video, but because, in the transition from one to the other, it is the memory of the third medium, the cinema, that surfaces. Something of the way the disposif of Figures in the Landscape operates the passage from stillness to movement is reminiscent of early film projections. Tom Gunning pointed out that part of the wonder experienced by the first cinema audiences was born out of the medium displaying its own specificity: to set off the spectacular, life-like effect of figures moving on the screen, the initial frame appeared frozen – to delay the moment where the content of the image became animated was part of the show. In Parente’s installation, the attraction of the moving image manifests itself through a similar contrast between the still panorama and the filmed sequences, but also, paradoxically, through the latters’ arresting power: to access the video, and immerse herself in it, the viewer in command of the binoculars has to stop her circumnavigation and focus on the content of the animated sequence, giving herself to a flow of images moved by forces outside of her control. Hence Figures in the Landscape invites us to reflect on the evolution of reception as triggered by the emergence of competing modes of viewing. Contrary to the mobile reception implied by the panoramic displays of the dioramas of old, in the cinema, immersion into movement depends on the immobility of the spectators’ bodies. In virtual reality, vision is again connected to bodily motion but this re-embodiment comes at a price: the partial loss of the distance that typically grounds the aesthetic dimension of film as art. Whereas in art cinema such an aesthetic experience is steeped in the encounter with another’s (the filmmaker’s, the director of photography’s, the editor’s), vision and subjectivity, in VR, the confrontation with the image partly subsumes under the process of interfacing — less an issue of immersion in the pre-existing image therefore, than a question of the spectatorial investment in partly controlling its transformation (direction, framing, speed).

Parente’s installation recasts this question of aesthetic distance as one of “hypermediacy”. Here, a crowd of spectators are given to see twice-mediated images: extracted from the set of photographs and videos created by the artist, the screened images are further mediated through one single viewer’s vision and choices. Immersion and immediacy (as experienced by the viewer using the binoculars) thus gives way to hypermediacy (the audience watching both the images and the user of the device who navigates through them). At the same time, the voice-over, intimate in tone, yet heard by all, sustains the sense of distance that establishes itself in the gap between the two modes of reception. Thus, with its superposition of singular interface and collective reception, Figures in the Landscape effectively disassembles the framework of the virtual reality effect.

Visually cut off from his or her immediate surroundings, the ‘blind viewer’ looking through the stereoscopic binoculars takes on the slightly monstrous, cyborg-like appearance that characterises all users of virtual reality equipment. Yet arguably more monstrous is the effect of the twofold gaze. One person looks and selects, but her choices are visible to all: the rest of the audience see through her eyes at it were. Even if the situation is one of co-presence (rather than voyeurism), the strange space thus created between individual observation and collective viewing breeds a feeling of trespassing: for the outer spectators, watching the screened images is a bit like reading someone else’s mind.

Furthermore, the stereoscopic binocular user, when immersed in the work, becomes blind to the gazes of those members of the audience whose eyes may leave the screen to focus on him or her instead. The sense of vulnerability is heightened by the VR user’s dance-like performance: the un-self-conscious choreography that the body performs, as he or she moves to look around, engrossed in the exploration of the immersive environment, watched by the rest of the gallery visitors. Yet to describe Figures in the Landscape as a mise en scène of voyeurism or the power of the simulacra would be to miss the point. For in its complex unfolding of the patterns of technologically mediated vision, Parente’s installation offers itself as a performance of “the media character of corporal movement”: the body of the VR user is the tool and filter through which images are communicated to the rest of the audience.

Martine Beugnet
(Full Professor at Université Paris-Diderot)

EXHIBITIONS:

Figuras na Paisagem, Curadoria de Alberto Saraiva, Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, 2010.
Real no Virutal, MAC, Fortaleza, 2011.
Infinito Paisaje, Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires, 2011.

CREDITS:

Concept and Coordination:
André Parente

Photography:
Andrea Capella

Photography Assistants:
João Paulo Toledo Quintella e Flora Dias

Programming and Digital Design:
Claudia Duarte

Script:
André Parente e Katia Maciel

Production:
Elianne Ivo

Production Assitants:
Daniel Fosco, Clarissa San Roman e Júlio Parente

Sound Capture:
Valéria Ferro

Editing and Sound design:
Clarissa San Roman e Daniel Fosco

Website:
Marlus Araújo

Consultants:
Katia Maciel e Júlio Parente

Special Thanks:
Antônio Cícero e Fernando Rodrigues