Beyond Seeing – Canvas, Magnetic Tape, Digital Medium
Page 3/4
Further along in the video “Saudade,” the speed of a streetcar makes the imagery of the city that the camera captures through its windows dissolve into colors and forms. Simultaneously, the voices on the video’s soundtrack that articulate its images seem all the more concrete. For this purpose, Bettina Rave has asked a most assorted group of women about what they would like to see.
Thus, both the fragmentary and the comparatively concrete descriptions of these imagined images on the audio thwart the fleeting and blurred imagery that can be seen in the video, which tell us how much what we see at all is influenced and dependent on the conditions and possibilities of sight as a physical process.
In this meditative reflection about the possibilities and conditions of seeing, which Bettina Rave has transcribed with a nearly untranslatable Portuguese term for an indifferent feeling of longing and loss, she has once again made picture supports and artistic reproduction techniques (here filming) her central theme, including the influences of lengths of takes and the focal widths of a lens, playback speed, and last but not least the recorded material.
In Bettina Rave’s work the medium can never be separated from its contents. The material is always part of what is represented and is expressed with the help of this material.
We seldom truly take in what we see. Our view is more conditioned by media viewing habits, screens, and picture sizes of thoroughly stylized user interfaces than any reality may at first appear today.
For this reason Bettina Rave almost always takes the proportions of her images from the classic screen aspect ratio 4:3, and sometimes also from cinema’s widescreen 16:9 format.
Thus, the viewer and his or her (viewing) relationship to an image is always borne in mind. The actual phenomena – around whose reproduction and recording all these technical and artistic skills (not to mention the human sense of sight itself) pains have been taken in this work – remain vague, never themselves becoming visible, but at best manifesting as fleeting shadows, colors or forms.
Or they suddenly break free from an almost archaic silence, like the details of a naked woman’s body that two slow tracking shots explore in the black-and-white video “still” (1997).
We see the vague impression of a hand, a woman’s face, then a landscape of skin that lifts and sinks in the rhythm of her breath. Exact conclusions and physiognomic recognition of the images are hardly possible until pubic hair rises suddenly in crude revelation. The camera rolls slowly through the hair and before long directly over the female genitalia.
The method in “still” is similar to “Saudade;” the excessively close proximity of the camera lens to the filmed object initially causes its obscuring. Here it is now the cleft surface of skin, the almost surreal plasticity of the hair.
However, just as the subject of the video suddenly and almost shockingly reveals itself, it is withdrawn from view.
Beyond Seeing – Canvas, Magnetic Tape, Digital Medium
Page 3/4
Further along in the video “Saudade,” the speed of a streetcar makes the imagery of the city that the camera captures through its windows dissolve into colors and forms. Simultaneously, the voices on the video’s soundtrack that articulate its images seem all the more concrete. For this purpose, Bettina Rave has asked a most assorted group of women about what they would like to see.
Thus, both the fragmentary and the comparatively concrete descriptions of these imagined images on the audio thwart the fleeting and blurred imagery that can be seen in the video, which tell us how much what we see at all is influenced and dependent on the conditions and possibilities of sight as a physical process.
In this meditative reflection about the possibilities and conditions of seeing, which Bettina Rave has transcribed with a nearly untranslatable Portuguese term for an indifferent feeling of longing and loss, she has once again made picture supports and artistic reproduction techniques (here filming) her central theme, including the influences of lengths of takes and the focal widths of a lens, playback speed, and last but not least the recorded material.
In Bettina Rave’s work the medium can never be separated from its contents. The material is always part of what is represented and is expressed with the help of this material.
We seldom truly take in what we see. Our view is more conditioned by media viewing habits, screens, and picture sizes of thoroughly stylized user interfaces than any reality may at first appear today.
For this reason Bettina Rave almost always takes the proportions of her images from the classic screen aspect ratio 4:3, and sometimes also from cinema’s widescreen 16:9 format.
Thus, the viewer and his or her (viewing) relationship to an image is always borne in mind. The actual phenomena – around whose reproduction and recording all these technical and artistic skills (not to mention the human sense of sight itself) pains have been taken in this work – remain vague, never themselves becoming visible, but at best manifesting as fleeting shadows, colors or forms.
Or they suddenly break free from an almost archaic silence, like the details of a naked woman’s body that two slow tracking shots explore in the black-and-white video “still” (1997).
We see the vague impression of a hand, a woman’s face, then a landscape of skin that lifts and sinks in the rhythm of her breath. Exact conclusions and physiognomic recognition of the images are hardly possible until pubic hair rises suddenly in crude revelation. The camera rolls slowly through the hair and before long directly over the female genitalia.
The method in “still” is similar to “Saudade;” the excessively close proximity of the camera lens to the filmed object initially causes its obscuring. Here it is now the cleft surface of skin, the almost surreal plasticity of the hair.
However, just as the subject of the video suddenly and almost shockingly reveals itself, it is withdrawn from view.