2009 – Inverted Cone – Julien Maire

DOCK artist in residence:
[intlink id=”462″ type=”post”]Julien Maire[/intlink]

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Inverted Cone

“The inverted cone” is a metaphor used in the book “Matters and memory” from Henry Bergson: it’s a simple drawing: an inverted cone whose summit is inserted into a plane. The plane “plane P” as Bergson calls it is the plane of “my actual representation of the universe”. The cone can be shortly describe as different levels of memory and experiences focused on one point. When we move in present time our conscience is the summit of the cone.
The installation ” The inverted cone ” is an almost 1 to 1 transposition of the concept of Bergson into an optical process.

Slide pictures, buyed on the  fly market since ten years (collection of Sebastien Koeppel), have been used as basic memory material for the  first presentation in Artefact Festival in Leuven (Belgium) Anonymous photographer, family pictures or industrial pedagogic slides are projected with a slide projector.
Rather to enlarge the image on a screen, the still image is reduced by lenses and is concentrated on a “Digital mirror”. DMD (Digital Micro-Mirror Device) are commonly used in video projectors, they perform the “digital light processing” or DLP developed by Texas Instruments.

The installation, uses a disassembled video projector, the micro mirror devise have been take out from the video beamer and receive directly the reduced slide projection. The video beamer is connected to a camera that  films the hand of the performer who organize some simple pieces of paper.
Each paper, opens a window in the projection (white color trigger the micro mirror and projects parts of the photographic picture on the screen: the spectator sees portions of the photographic picture through the video projection.

The performer chooses some details simply by moving the pieces of paper on a table. He discovers and recomposes slowly a global memory or performs a selective remind of a moment. Some pictures are trivial some other contains a large amount of information. Past and present medium are here in fusion in one shot: a projection of a moving plane (the video) is directly confronted with a still, there are two very different layers and they continue to carry their own visual basic properties.
The system produce a very particular composite image that have nothing to do with a digital processing of a picture through a computer.

The system is working with all kind of positive  lm material, 35 mm, 8, or 16 mm  Film as well as all kind of still pictures and also episcope projection which maks it possible to use all kind of paper / reproduction and archives.

We show a first version of this new work in collaboration with transmediale.10 at the exhibition ‘Future Obscura’ 2 -7 February 2010 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin:  http://www.transmediale.de/de/node/11351

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