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Recycled Screenings recently presented Metaleptic Attack from the Swiss artist and scholar Johannes Binotto.
Below are statements by Johannes and Will DiGravio, curator of Recycled Screenings, and a video conversation between the two about the work.
Below are statements by Johannes and Will DiGravio, curator of Recycled Screenings, and a video conversation between the two about the work.
Johannes has asked that any donations be made to Recycled Screenings. To support the work of the platform, please donate below.
Curator's Statement
Intimacy. That is the word that first comes to mind when thinking about the moving images of Johannes Binotto. Few artists and scholars who work with found footage develop such palpably intimate relationships with their material. See, for example, his early works, like Facing Film (2017), one of the most influential video essays of the last decade. Johannes’ recent pieces, while still celebrated works of videographic criticism, have veered closer to the found footage tradition more commonly associated with experimental cinema, yet maintain that sense of intimacy. Such is the case with Metaleptic Attack, a work that carries traces of Johannes’ scholarship and videographic practice and marks a new style and direction for the artist.
Johannes takes up a familiar topic – the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (a frequent subject of his video essays), and in this case The Birds (1963) – in Metaleptic Attack. The works concerns attacks, including the one in the film and the one on the film by the a/v equipment he employs. Attack is another form of intimacy. And Johannes plays with that idea here, especially when he shows us his own hands at work. The intimacy also manifests as a kind of love, a love for technology and for the director whose work he often (re)appropriates. Johannes’ love, though, never feels blind. It is always in the service of experimentation, analysis, and understanding. Intimate love leads to discovery. He often takes us with him on a journey, where we enter not only his mind, but the fabric of whatever material he reworks through the screen.
- Will DiGravio
Creator's Statement
An attempt to remake a film by destroying it. To make it even more frightening than it ever dared to be, by letting the film attack my own viewing and editing machines. And have my viewing practices attack the film.
When Alfred Hitchcock for his 1963 film The Birds instead of natural audio used electronic sounds created by German composer Oskar Sala, he did so because of the ability of these disturbing sound objects "to vibrate on more than just one level." The electronic sound of the birds not only oversteps the boundary between living being and machine, but also between the content and form, as if the shrieking sounds of the birds not only attack the characters within the film but he film itself.
It is this I tried not only to capture, but to amplify – unbearably. From sound to image, from cinema to video, and back.
- Johannes Binotto
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