My Favorite Lies
Collin Kluchman
@Speculum Artium 2021
Light follows the breath. Night falls, lighting strikes. The midday birds continue.
These diaristic reflections on the phenomenology of watching and waiting write with images through an electronic ink screen. Filmed over a period of confinement in Vendée and Paris, France, they straddle an experiential world of immediate sensation, and a detached realm of quiet reflection.
The tablets that display the picture are meant to replicate the feel and reflectivity of paper and ink. Spectators encounter these repurposed screens as if they were stumbling upon an already opened diary and could not help but peer inside. The videos are set on loop with the entries following one another sequentially.
The images created by electronically choreographed points of ink are neither pure impressions as remembered by the mind of the narrator and committed to paper, nor are they completely imaginary fabrications or aberrations of technology.
The visuals flow to the rhythms of thought and language. We pause on an image long enough for it to speak and move on. Pictures and text leapfrog. The long flow of sound is heavy by contrast. It pulls with the weight of the present, objective and detached. The breaths heard are that of a sleeper, unconscious and brute. This drone is meditative in its ambience and its temporal disconnection from the images makes us feel delicate.
This forward march of moments is punctuated, interrupted and fractured by thoughts and memories. Mythological and literary references distract from this present and help interpret it. The writer wants to reconnect with the world of people and things. Yet his desire for it, his textualizing of it, prevents him from experiencing it through touch, sight, and sound. He sees through images as much as his eyes.
