excerpt
DVD user's Manual
Take your time.
Traces of images appear on the screen; to reveal them, move the cursor over the traces; when the image becomes sufficiently visible it will start to move (except the cases where it is a still image). The revelation process can be accelerated by pressing down the mouse button. If the cursor leaves the image, new traces will appear.
To erase all traces on the screen and start anew click on the small circle in the upper right corner of the screen.
At all times you can access the database by clicking on the small circle in the lower right corner of the screen. To return to the exploration path you can click on the background outside the list view of the database.
This DVD is both a database of Thierry Kuntzel's entire body of work and a creation of its own. Through images and sounds taken from his videos and installations, interspersed with some of his notes, either written or read aloud, it offers three ways of approaching his work which highlight some of its key aspects. Each path has two entries. A few junctions along the way lead from one path to another, and imperceptibly guide the viewer to other themes. At any moment along the way, the viewer can set off down a new path.
1- The body and its distortion. Here we find skin and detail, the caress of a gaze, but also a face erased by too much light, the body split in two, reduplicated, transparent, beneath a sheet, behind a frame, leaves, glimpsed. At times a self-portrait, preferably caught up in an electronic frequency or shot from behind, childlike. All activity is minimal, unhurried: smoking, contemplating, reading, crossing the screen. The activity of thinking, desiring.
Entry 1: the present body, a hand touching a naked arm (Printemps).
Entry 2: light-traces of what must be another arm, a hand holding a cigarette (Nostos 1).
2- Landscape and representation. Here we see the horizon, a panorama of San Francisco or Tampico, perspective, framing, a window. The view and its obstruction, or simply the light that filters through a door ajar to perhaps reveal some secret. Projected light, tracking light, colourful variations, they produce / transform a studio as they do the landscape. Between dazzlement and darkness, another space, foliated, blurred, sometimes takes shape.
Entry 1: the sea, waves and surf (The Waves)
Entry 2: the sea once again, with the laguna and Venice on the horizon (Venises)
3- Here the beat and pause, series, the tension between movement – of the camera or in-camera processing of the image – and stasis, extreme slow-motion, the tomb. Time and memory, between acceleration and freeze-frame.
Entry 1: The beat of a heart and the light on the inscription “Nevermore” (Tombeau d'Edgar Allan Poe)
Entry 2: the flicker-beat of projected light (Still)
The association of these fragments is based on thematic or formal affinities, or on the emphases particular to Thierry Kuntzel's work. Unaccompanied by reference notes or commentary, each image appears in an almost random way on the screen's surface, never returning to the same place, it seeps from the edge or interior of another image – the blue of one merges with the ocre of another. Clouds of colour “take” shape and form an image while we're not even watching (if we hold the cursor down, for example, we accelerate the image's emerging). Discovery is the guiding principle: elements appear, attract our gaze, but it is up to the viewer to seize them to make the image truly appear. It is left to the viewer to free the image from the screen's matter and density. If the viewer doesn't intervene, the images simply continue their interaction and incredible unfolding.
There's nothing excessive here, no click, no menu.
Operating procedures:
Four functions can be found at the four corners of the screen:
Right-hand top: go back to the beginning of the path, or start another
Left-hand top: exit
Left-hand bottom: Thierry Kuntzel's biography
Right-hand bottom: database
The database gives access to:
- documents about Kuntzel's installations, videos, video installations and other projects.
- a collection of 600 of the artist's notes, handwritten or transcribed, all his theoretical essays on cinema and video, gathered together for the first time.
- a selection of texts about his work.
- a list of exhibitions.
For each work, a variety of resource materials are available:
- a brief technical description
- a commentary that may be a note by the artist, an excerpt from a review or a short text presented here for the first time
- one or several excerpts from the video, or photos of the installation
- several descriptions of the installations based the artist's sketches
- the artist's notes – handwritten (that can be enlarged) and transcribed – that directly refer to the specific work or are related to it
- complementary documents: scores, drawings, photos
- a few reviews or criticism, or excerpts from essays directly related to the work in question
- works that are linked to it. Thierry Kuntzel often creates series: the Nostos, the Tombeaux, the Saisons…
