Check out my two new videos: ‘At the bus stop‘ and ‘Automaton‘. They form together an installation that I have called ‘Breath’, because it depicts the consciousness’s breath, its pace, its repetition. The only possible way to classify this work is art, not because I unilaterally declare its superiority, but because it fits in no other categories.
The idea of those videos came to me a little less than a year ago. It started when I was on my way back home at the North Greenwich station. I had a vision of someone looking at a still creature, seat on the roof of the London’s O2 Dome. I tried to understand what this vision meant. I slowly realized that this creature of my imagination was in fact a representation of a mood, a state of consciousness, seated between the character and the object of his brief attention.
I then had the same vision but at different times of the day, different locations. It was something following me. Though with an important exception, the creature faded away when I was not alone, in action, in a communication with someone, totally emerged in the instant.
It took me a while to translate those feelings into a storyboard. I progressively abandoned the idea of a creature to keep the essential, a minimalist representation of the consciousness: a colour, a movement. My technique to build a storyboard is to start imaging a scene, then see if I can find what will be the next, and the next. I know I found the right angle when each new scene I think of makes me more excited than the previous one, and when everything seems to flow easily, consistently, at all levels. It’s an intense moment of satisfaction.
Once the storyboard drawn, I took videos with my Canon Ixus 80, of motorways in Greenwich, buses, trains and stations of the London public transports, offices and few other places. Then followed as often a predictable and quite boring stage of production: the video selection, edition (I used Sony Vegas), the digitalization of my draws and so on. The most difficult part is when I put everything back together and compose the soundtrack. It is at this stage that what I imagined is confronted with the material I have a front of me. It takes a lot of time, and my full concentration to shape a video which is genuinely close to my feelings, consistent but still fresh. It is only possible if the initial vision is truly important to me, at multiple levels. Otherwise, the narrative doesn’t work, things don’t get together. But when this difficult task is done, comes my biggest joy. Looking back at my work, I can analyze it and discover all the hidden significations I didn’t realize before. And then I understand how I found the energy to make it, why it was so important to me.
This is the first project for which I’m really thinking about the installation. My experience of the past years taught me how important it is to condition an audience for the reception of a video. My videos are one the Internet so that everyone can see what kind of things I do. But I know that most people will not be receptive to my productions on a computer screen. I’m myself not often receptive to that kind of videos when I’m at home. I need to be in a special place, have the work presented in a certain way, so that I can give myself a chance to get into it. This is the kind of environment I tried to imagine for ‘Breath’.
Of course, this is just my way of inventing videos…
Breath – At the bus stop from Christophe Bruchansky on Vimeo.
