Thing

video, b/w, 16:9, stereo, BE/IT/FR, 2013, 18:00

An architect talks about the city he built. We travel through his virtual memory to a boundless, imaginary space. About a place’s memory, about fictitious buildings and the continuation of the past in today’s urban patterns. The architect’s ideas do not take on a particular form, but that does not make them less appealing.
Thing reveals an unreliable, yet beautiful reality.

As part of this work a book Thing is published by MER. Paper Kunsthalle. This is the first book in the The art of ~scaping series.

In previous works, such as Pixelspleen – where two pixels meet in a dark and vast space – , or Swan Song – a speculation about a pixel’s last song, or last dance before death – Anouk De Clercq draws on what might be called “the smallest unit” that makes up the digital image. In Thing, it is no longer about the pixel, but rather about the dot, or more accurately, about the scale interplay between the dot and its multiplication and organization in the digital image and space. Screened at a very large scale, Thing, is an architectural universe that ceaselessly reveals its own virtuality for it exists only as a nebula of points wherein the camera, or actually, the point of view, wanders.

Indeed, the technology used in Thing does not allow talking about a camera since it is made of 3D scans of urban spaces. Instead, we could talk about a point of view, a gaze, or even a body (that wanders). Thereby, a tension is generated between the mechanical register of space and its embodied perception. A tension or overlap between two sensing interfaces: the scanner and the body, without any need to determine whether there is a desire to reproduce the mode of sensing of the latter through the technology of the former.

Unlike other works in which the animation is for the artist an occasion to create spaces without memory (precisely because animation does not capture anything), in Thing, the virtual universe does have a memory; the scanner does capture. The same memory that a body has or that is required in the learning of perception.
Calling it Thing is a resistance to provide connotation beyond the signalling of a paradoxical – for it is virtual – materiality. Notwithstanding the nuances between authors and periods, the word “thing” in philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions has often been used to refer to the inaccessible, a stronghold of inexplicable emptiness on which meaning is built.
Thing, is a film that is built from a text that progressively describes, creates, or builds a space. The dot and the word become thereby, parallel compositional elements.

Anna Manubens

Image Scanlabprojects
Sound Scanner
Editor Fairuz
Voice Liam Byrne
Dramaturgy Marianne Van Kerkhoven
Text editing & translation Mari Shields
Final sound mixing Maxence Ciekawy at Le Fresnoy studio national des arts contemporains
Technical research Elias Heuninck, Yves Marquillie
Title design Michaël Bussaer
Produced by Auguste Orts
Executive producer Marie Logie
With the support of Flanders Audiovisual Fund, CERA Partners in Art, Kaaitheater, Academia Belgica (IT), Le Fresnoy studio national des arts contemporains (FR)
Thank you Dirk De Meyer, Christian Hajer, Thomas Parker, Paul Robbrecht, Alex Scott-Whitby, Matthew Shaw, Christine Sticher
This work is part of The art of ~scaping, a research project by Anouk De Clercq, funded by the Research Fund University College Ghent.
Distributed by Auguste Orts, LIMA, Light Cone

Awards

Prix Ars Electronica 2014 Honorary Mention for Computer Animation/Film/VFX
Nominated for a Tiger Award, International Film Festival Rotterdam 2014
Nominated for the Cutting Edge Award 2014
Nominated for the Fernand Baudin Prize 2013

In the public collection of

Collection of the Flemish Authorities

Previously on display at the following locations