Breathing Understudy | Alex Villar
Breathing Understudy | Alex Villar
Curated by Denise Carvalho for the Mediations Biennale, 2012
Breathing Understudy presents a series of scenes that conflate the suppression of breathing, body suspension and immersion inx water. The depicted situations result from a conflation of two distinct but resembling practices: sports and torture. More particularly, the scenes derive on one hand from the underwater sport known as static apnea and on the other hand from water based torture techniques like water boarding and immersion.
While the objective in torture obviously differ from the one in sports, the techniques used in both cases intersect in their pushing of the body beyond conventional limits. What is inhuman in one case becomes super human in the other. At the threshold of these limit experiences lies the pivotal possibilities of death or survival. But despite all calculations as to the subject’s ability to resist or endure adverse situations, their definite outcome remains an unforeseeable, which is to say unknown, possibility.
The title for the installation of the piece Breathing Understudy at the Mediations Biennale is Cinema-Aquarium. It refers to the qualities that are shared by these two types of spaces: container and screen. A cinema is at a minimum a space that contains viewers while subjecting them to a visual experience of movement. So is the aquarium as it both contains living subjects and presents their movement as a visual experience. The difference between them boils down to who gets more encapsulated into the experience.
The video should be presented as a double projection onto the rolling doors of the building on East Noble South (N2). The decayed industrial cityscape of the area, coupled with the waving pattern on these two doors provide an ideal background for the contents of the projected image.
Cinema-Aquarium seeks to collapse the distinction between observed and observed by placing the viewer both inside and outside the aquarium, both as a cinema viewer and as a subject immersed and implicated in the depicted experience. The idea of constructing a provisional architectural space to house both the projected video and the viewers in a single experiential space is a recurrent question in my work. It was the case in the installation versions of Other Ways, Temporary Occupations, Overtime, Waste Management and Crash Course. CinemaAquarium will be going much further by turning the entire structure into a dual-sided projection wall that can be seen and experienced both from the outside and from the inside. Projection Four powerful video projectors will be required to cover the four walls that comprise the sides of the installation. A 5000 lumens with a native resolution of 1920 x 1080 is the minimum recommended for each projector. The projectors need to be placed on the outer side of the constructed walls. Each of the projectors need to be set vertically to accommodate the high definition video source that is also being shot with
the camera set on the vertical position. They should be set half way up from the ground at a tangent position to the right side of each projection wall. The video will be provided as a four-channel piece, meaning that it is being edited as a choreographed sequenced that will require syncing among projectors.The movie files will be produced in full HD size (1920 x 1080 pixels), high resolution, h.264, Quicktime.The files should be played from portable media players attached to the projectors. Projection Screen/Walls The form of the built space for the installation derives from a cube sectioned at two diagonally opposing corners and pushed apart to create points of access into the space. The structure is put together by connecting aluminum pipes to each other by using industrially cast aluminum fittings. Stretchable rear projection screen material will cover the surfaces of the four sides of two sets of connected walls.The dimensions of this construction follow from the proportions of the projected image. Each of the walls would measure 8 feet wide x 14.5 feet height. The entire space will measure 12 x 8 x 14.5 feet. An additional area around will be required to place the projectors; the precise position of these projectors can be calculated once the projector model/lens combination is known.