Interative installation
2010/2014
The Circuladô is an interactive installation that simulates a giant zoetrope operated by viewers who inside it can regulate the speed and direction of images projected simultaneously on a circular screen. The Circuladô gathers together found footages of characters that live limit-situations: Thelonius Monk (Straight no chase, Charlotte Zwerin,1988) whirls around himself, sometimes on stage, sometimes everywhere, as if he were having a psychotic seizure; each time Oedipus (Edipo Re, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967) arrives at the crossroads, he covers his eyes with his hands, gyrates and continues his journey in the direction in which he stopped spinning, as a way of not choosing the destiny foreseen by the oracle; Corisco (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Glauber Rocha, 1965) Corisco, before dropping dead, opens his arms and spins); Dervish whirling (Decasia, Bill Morrison, 2002) is one of the most ancient and vigorous methods of spinning and trance. As in most of my projects, the work can be updated in different versions depending on the conditions of display and projection. In the case of Circuladô, there are three different versions: video, video installation and interactive installation. Here we are showing two different possibilities of interactive installation already realized in 2011 (Museum of Image and Sound, São Paulo) and 2014 (National Foundation of Art, Brasília), whereby the spectator, by way of a crank, can determine the spin velocity of the images projected within it. What interested me from the very beginning was to create a work in which we see the characters whirling around as a result of the way the spectators turn the device’s crank. Summing up, we are talking about blending, in a single work, device and concept, mental loops and physical loops, images of spinning movement and circular devices, and moving images and the spectator’s movement – that is, making this work a bridge that connects pre-cinematographic devices to post-cinematographic devices, having as its content and form the issue of spinning and of the body of the image.
ISMAIL XAVIER:
“André Parente’s installation Circuladô belongs in the constellation of works which emphasises repetition and variation, a structural principle of his plethora of spinning bodies collected from films and brought together based on a standard and formal motion, a visual motif which configures experience as kind of “theme-and-variations” game. In Circuladô, the rotation motif unfolds, from an image projection of spinning bodies on screens, evoking the circular motion of looped images, typical of 19th century devices, a time when the spinning of gears marked the mechanical era of the Industrial Revolution which, in the sphere of public and domestic amusement, were symbolised by numerous devices based on mechanical joints, disk rotations, and windows for intermittent observation, like the zoetrope, the phenakistoscope, the praxinoscope, and other machines which, before the development of cinema, produced different forms of moving image illusion through manual operation. They were called “Philosophical Toys”, for they created such illusion, but at the same time revealed the mechanism that produced it, generating great interest by this combination of entertainment and technological progress that gave rise to a peculiar charm which relied on the complicity with an immediate (and desired) idea of magic, and awareness (in brackets) of the technical-pragmatic mechanism generating the effect. Today, given the new configuration of moving-image technologies, and considering the immense repertoire accumulated over more than a century of experiments with the projection of moving images, the forms of reception in the context of video art, and, more markedly, in art installations, are distinguished by a higher degree of epistemological curiosity, no without a fetishistic side, when compared to the experience provided by the philosophical toys.
Circuladô cites passages from films in which the characters are uniquely immersed in a rotation which introduces different forms of ritual that count as affirmation of the body and gesture in a symbolic sphere. The body rotates in the here and now, but its movement signals an ecstatic state of consciousness (the getting-out-of-oneself) which puts it in contact with another realm whose nature is defined by the specific content of the experience. After all, the images extracted from these films are versions of a Baroque combination of dynamism and obsession, very typical of characters like Saint Francis of Assisi, Oedipus, and Corisco, who impressed us when they were revisited by modern filmmakers – Rossellini, Pasolini, and Glauber – whose creations revolved around the interface between the profane and the sacred, history and myth, commitment with the here and now, and search of transcendence. Here lies an attraction to circular motion which gives rise to ceremonies, an impetus that reaches – in the case of another fragment, the spinning of the Sufi dervish – ad nauseam repetition as a form of prayer leading to a limit experience of trance and unity with the cosmos through a choreography that combines repetition and a sense of elevation. It is something typical of the Sufi ritual – but not exclusive to it – to link the spinning of the human body with the movement of the heavenly bodies, one version among many of the metaphysical postulation of an essential connection between the human body’s rotation, the rotations of the gravitational field, and the nature of the Cosmic Order.
A relentless play of attraction and repulsion thematised in Parente’s installation, marking the articulation between the structure of the device, its visual motif, and the specific content of each scene brought to our attention. This ambivalence unfolds when the rotations’s dynamics is subjected to the modulation controlled by the interactive spectator who, thus, re-experiences the condition of a prestidigitator of the zoetrope or from juggler shows, experiences from the past and present that imply a certain enchantment with tricks of perception in view of this combination of epic progression and repetition, linearity and eternal return, present in our connection with images since the philosophical toys, in a secular and popular record of perception, without a sense of wonder in the pure and harsh sense of religion or modernity studies. Circuladô and its semi-circular screen make us move in-between these two records, now more focused on electronic prestidigitation and our delight with the cinephiles’s repertoire celebrated in it; but given the choice, it never tires to suggest how much the paradigm of rotation resembles other spheres”. (see the complete text on Circuladô catalog)
SIMONE OSTHOFF:
“The interactive installation Circuladô [Spiner] (2011) is like a giant zoetrope operated by viewers who inside it can regulate the speed of images projected simultaneously ona circular screen. On each a man spins — Corisco, Oedipus, Sufi dervish, Monk — each spinning in a liminal encounter with destiny, madness, death, and ecstasy. Circuladô further combines new and old media, while suggesting that viewers can harness the powers of incarnation and incantation that speak to the recesses of our psyche. There is a quality of timelessness in these images, of older rites, and oral traditions. These ecstatic experiences are a homage not only to the history of cinema, but also to the body-centered experiences of cannibalism, carnival, and hunger which have been central to the Brazilian Anthropophagic, Neoconcrete, and Cinema Novo movements. In Circuladô, manifestations of the primal, the transitory, and the ephemeral are connected through viewer participation, for instance, to Ferreira Gullar’s “Theory of the não-objeto” [Theory of the non-object], 1959, which was later radicalized by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oititica in the 1960s. Oiticica once embraced the ecstasy of samba dance as a way of turning information into knowledge. Such are some of the circular experiences suggested by Circuladô, a title that further references oral culture by way of Caetano Veloso’s music and poetry, an oeuvre in itself a kind of cinematic spin, as the composer often creates moving images with words, melody and rhythm”. (see the complete text on Circuladô Catalog).
LUIZ CLAUDIO DA COSTA:
“In Circuladô some images are documentary, other fictional. Even when we know into which genre they fall, this way of classifying things rapidly loses meaning. The truth about Oedipus, about Antonio das Mortes or the sufi dancer has nothing to do with whether it is fiction or documentary reality. The trance evinced by these characters pushes the perception of objective limits into a deeply-flawed terrain, allowing the meaning of the images to wander around aimlessly without giving them a set point of flight, or the right place for them to become stable. By promoting the trance-like state of the images, Parente contaminates both narrative genres, fiction and documentary. In fact, according to the logic of the classical view of identification based on precise limits, these genres correspond to two different perspectives, one subjective and fictional, and the other objective and documentary. The logic of contamination, on the contrary, dictates that the trance must lay the ground for a new subjectivity and hence a new model for vision. To see the world as a pattern of references signifies activating the power of a non-mimetic imagination able to build untruthful descriptions of the world. The trance state of these characters, the whirlwind of images, both create an absence of the immediate present and envelop the spectator in virtual images of modern film. Plunged into these absences of the present, his attention perturbed and fractured, the observer-as-subject is transformed. He leaves behind the simple sensory-motor play of interactivity using his body to activate the lever in order to interrupt or substitute the images projected. In this way, as each automatic repetition of the interactive movement takes place, the spectator gradually loses his location, his position and focus. Little by little, his attention becomes unstable, transitory, like that of the characters themselves. The conditions of an untruthful perception have been created. The world is not the external object of an internal vision. There is no room to build a truthful representation. Neither has vision become independent and broken away from the referential reality of the devices, as was the case in the 19th century. Referential reality is present, is now, related to the body of the spectator interacting with the instruments at his disposal, acting like a machine operator. But now, affected by the perturbations of trances and madness, he discovers a world lying between documentary reality and fiction. Between these two generic forms of the image, there is another dynamic and temporal dimension of continuous transformation”. (see the complete text on the catalog)
CREDITS:
Director and Producer: André Parente
Assistant Director: Luisa Fosco
Technical Director: Júlio Parente
Sound Editor: André e Lucas Parente
Architect: Pedro Varela
Graphic Design (for the catalog):
Estúdio Marcia Cabral
Gallery of artist: Jaqueline Martins (São Paulo)
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