Published with permission by the artist.

Antonio Geusa


Psyche and the Digital: A Journey Aboard of Lumière’s Train through Alexandra Dementieva’s Video Land

Ut pictura poesis
(Horace, Ars Poetica ll. 361)


On December 28, 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière gave to the recent invention of photography the gift of movement. A few of the very first of these images were born aboard of a train, in the specific, smoky wagons arriving at the station of La Ciotat in France. The audience gathered in the basement lounge of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris to witness the presentation of this marvel was totally absorbed and amazed by what they experienced. The Lumière’s Cinématographe even terrified some of them. The press commenting the event reported that people fell off their chairs, ran away from the room, or ducked for cover, scared that the train might go off the rails, come out of the screen, and hit them.
Today, when cinema has become an ordinary part of urban life and is no longer a fairground wonder, it seems symptomatic that the Lumière brothers chose to film a train to demonstrate the sensational power of the machine that they had invented. In other words, today that train impressed on film more than one hundred year ago can be taken as a conveyor of the cinema itself, the device that brought static images to life.
Singularly, the binomial train/cinema becomes an essential component in Alexandra Dementieva’s videography. Therefore, it would not be inappropriate to take them as starting points in the analysis of her single-channel videos. To a certain degree, it could be ventured that the train plays a leading role as content with its actual presence (or its metaphorical implications of transference), whilst the cinema stands as one of the dominant layers for what concerns the form of these works.

The train, in the guise of both aboveground and underground railway, recurs several times becoming a sign that engenders a complex network of meanings. Dementieva does not employ it as an allegory of transport, which would be its most immediate valence. On the contrary, she displays it as both container and contained. Her trains carry passengers – doors constantly opening and closing letting people in and out – and, at the same time, with their dynamic presence they interact with the compositional structure of the frame in symbiosis with the digital manipulation applied to the shot.
Immediate interpretation of the train is the notion of the journey, of moving from one place to another, of progressing forward. Accordingly, each video is as a visual trip to a certain destination – very often an urban landscape –, that special territory where the viewer is carried to. Dementieva’s videos are journeys that might lead to a real geographical territory like China (China’s Diary), or a fabricated one like in Trafic where the scrolling city streets are composed of different places, or again, like in most cases, an unspecified one, a place that could be anywhere and nowhere at the same time. Symptomatically, these are not empties spaces. On the other hand, the people populating them are pivotal components. Far from being decorative ornaments, they are the quintessential detail explicative of the space they inhabit. Hence, the Chinese girl endlessly washing her hair in China’s Diary illustrates the slow passing of time that occurs at a surprisingly different pace from the West; the body lying lifeless on the floor in Not Unexpected Encounters disrupts the compactness of a story made of repeated brief meetings opening up a mystery that has no solution; the young couple jumping in the air inside an amusement ride in Midi Fair adds a “cosmic” construal to the narrative; and the blurry image of man having a drink in a dimly lit bar in Do YouRemember? serves as a reminder of reality in a storyline composed with the imagery of a dream.
Distinguishing characteristic of all these journeys that the viewers experience when they watch these works is the way impressions and emotions are induced. The visual impact of images is in fact never violent or predatory. The selected footage is always a prompt of elusive events. Ingeniously, situations are simply suggested. They are never explained in full. Elucidative instances are the above-mentioned “non unexpected encounters”. They are evocative of “romantic scenes” – the stare as an index of desire – without being illustrative. They trigger a whole story without displaying the details. As a consequence, the feeling of desire entailed in the gaze of the people meeting the video camera’s eye is highly elusive. Even in the repetition of the same encounter it does not become obsessive like when overwhelming passion takes over. One more example of Dementieva’s elusiveness is traceable in Autoportr 21 when the screen at a certain point is turned into a whirl of psychedelic images. Here, the hallucinogenic trip is only announced. It does not become a statement. The link with reality – although indefinite in both its temporal and spatial dimensions – is never severed.

Dementieva’s “light touch” conveys a sort of suspension that does not saturate situations or feelings overcharging them with too many mysterious details or incomprehensible plots. Images flow blurring boundaries and mixing people and places. In doing so, the artist manages to dislocate the convention of linear narrativeness. She instead replays it with shifting layers of meanings whose value depends on the viewers themselves; that is to say, on the way their minds rebuild the suggested plot filling in the missing links.
At this point, it is important to put in evidence that, despite the chaotic arrangement of the recorded footage and its elaborated digital rendering, this procedure is never fortuitous. On the other hand, it comes out of a carefully devised strategy. Each of these videos is in fact meticulously assembled in the editing room. It is this accuracy with which Dementieva constructs her works that allows putting in evidence an essential aspect of her videography: the challenge to the viewers’ visual perception. It would be therefore appropriate to state that the artist’s videos operate within the sphere of Phenomenology, the philosophy of consciousness. As a matter of fact, her images are digitally manipulated and arranged in such a way that, when they enter the viewer’s mental space, they challenge his/her perceptive faculties. Above all, these are videos that solicit direct involvement, although they are only screened and do not require the physical participation like in the artist’s well-known installations. After all, it is not a negligible detail that these works are made to be projected and not shown on a television (or computer) monitor. For the way they stimulate active interrelations with the viewer’s subconscious these videos can be legitimately called “concentrated installations” .
Actions happening simultaneously on multiple screens within one frame, intriguing plots that do not follow a linear development, labyrinthine compositions, and, most of all, the digital manipulation of the original footage are some of the devices that demonstrate the reasons why the experience of watching is never passive, but it demands vigilant observation. Legitimately, these works can be considered theoretical essays written with images and sounds instead of words on the mechanisms involved in visual perception and, above all, their interrelations with the human subconscious. To a certain degree, these are “texts” that can be aligned with the English Modernism in the literature of the beginning of the 1990s. The “visual stream of consciousness” of Dementieva’s works contains in fact echoes of the most challenging pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). To adopt a vocabulary consonant with the above-mentioned image of the train, these stories designate derailed communication, the derailing of coding and decoding of visual patterns, and the impossibility of assigning one single meaning. The way Dementieva narrates her “modernist stories” is also peculiar and illustrative. Abandoning the fixed position on a tripod, very often she takes her video camera in her hand and walks around, making the viewers seeing what she is actually seeing when filming. In doing so, she does not limit herself to the role of the detached narrator. She assigns instead to herself that of a narrator who is both extradiegietic to interdiegetic letting her “character” constantly move in and out of the narration she is telling.

The cinema, the other keyword isolated as of primary importance in the analysis of Dementieva’s videography, offers in Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) a valuable instance that would help illustrating in details the manner these works are composed. The way she manipulates and arranges her taped footage is in fact very close to the “grammar lessons” given by the Russian director in his pivotal film. Transparencies, superimpositions, split screens, acceleration in speed, upside-down and flipped shots form the phraseology of the artist’s visual language. Incidentally, these structures dominate over unedited segments, simple fade-ins and fade-outs, and unconventional position of the video camera when recording, which are instead characteristic of the early makers when video became available to the art community in the United States in the mid-nineteen sixties, such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci. Accordingly, it could be said that Dementieva’s videos are characterised by a Janus-like nature containing both the basic principles of video art and the cinema, given that they are made for the contemporary art space according to a structure (and a sensibility) that are deeply indebted to certain directors and a certain type of films.
For what concerns the artist’s mentors from the realm of cinema, David Lynch, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Stanley Kubrick are in the front line, whilst the genre that appears to be overtly influential on her is the Film Noir of the 1940s and 1950s with a sensible predilection for the French Film Noir of the 1950s and the 1960s. The leading role of digital technology lies at the core of the bond between the videos and these directors and the noir genre. As an artist, Dementieva finds in digital technology the best form to express her creativity. Her single-channel videos – as well as her installations – are above all digital works conceived and realised with the knowledge and expertise of someone who is a professional, and not someone who delegates the technical aspects to others. Highlighting these important quality in the artist would also help to better understand the structure supporting her works, that is to say a structure that is deeply depended on the technological reworking of the videoed images in the editing laboratory with the proper digital equipment; a structure that leaves to chance a very marginal role.

Symptomatically, one of Dementieva’s very first single-channel videos can be interpreted as a statement on the digital nature of her work. Error (2000) consists in fact of a sequence of “broken images” – images that are not whole, but fragmented into rectangular sections of various dimensions. As a consequence of this fragmentation, the screen looks like a game of puzzle where a certain image is divided into broken pieces and rearranged into a chaotic composition. The title hints with subtle irony that a malfunctioning machine has created such confusion, the “error”, an error that as above all a digital consistency of “out of order” pixels.
At the same time, Error aptly illustrates the above-mentioned challenge to visual perception which has been emphasised as essential character of the artist’s videography. Clearly, presenting the effects of a malfunctioning machine, Dementieva also deconstructs the visual field offered to the viewers challenging the mechanisms regulating the process of sensorial perception. When watching these patterns, viewers cannot simply take in what they see. Their minds instead automatically attempt to recompose the original images the way they were before they were split into a puzzle.
A third element present in Error that is fundamental in demonstrating the complexity of Dementieva’s work even when on the surface a video may appear rather straightforward is the interposition of an urban landscape on the broken image. This digital application of transparency can be isolated as the author own signature; a way to mark her presence and to subtly state that even when the machine and its chance malfunctioning can offer the plot of the story, it is the artist’s intromission that turns it into a work of art.

Another video made that same year that unmistakably illustrate the complex frame upon which Dementieva’s works are built is Midi Fair (2001). It starts with eerie glimpses of an urban landscape. The video camera’s eye pries into the back of buildings inhabited by unspecified people. Their balconies and the objects they contain – abandoned reliquaries of ordinary lives without any concessions to glamour of dilapidation – seems to belong to a chance encounter. The artist in one of her ramblings might have run into such a panorama. But when the tale unfolds and an object from the same compositional plane – an amusement ride – become the setting of the following chapter, it appears evident that both those balconies and the amusement ride belong to a carefully devised plan, a script that is not made of improvised lines. In its turn, the second part of this story, the one with the amusement ride as protagonist, stresses once again the elaborate consistency of the structure of Midi Fair. The trip of the man sitting inside the ride is filmed from the outside as well as from the inside. The close-ups of the young man were recorded with a video camera mounted inside the cabin.
This second part can also be isolated to illustrate the above-mentioned link with the cinema. In the specific, pivotal cinematic reference is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Significantly, at the very beginning the voice over informs that the action is taking place in the year 2001. To a certain extent, the trip inside the cabin of the amusement ride that the young man makes reminds of that of Dr Bowman final mission to “Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite” in Kubrick’s film. In both case, the (film and video) camera is used as a means to delve into the psychology of the protagonists of the story narrated. The journeys of both men are surrounded in mystery to such an extent that, ultimately, the meaning is in the hands of the viewers who have witnessed the trip
Midi Fair is also a pertinent instance to emphasise the function that music in general plays in Dementieva’s videos. Here, like in most of her work, the soundtrack is not made of popular tones or melodies. On the other hand, the music comes out of unconventional instruments producing irregular sounds that perfectly blend in with the images. Far from creating contrasts and dissensions, this Cage-like appropriation of sounds enhances the elusive perception of ambiguity and vagueness in the viewer.

Close in time to Midi Fair is Tool without an Interesting Name, 2001. Here, Dementieva continues her experimental research into the mechanism regulating visual perception and the ways they can be challenged. The digital effects – above all superimposition of more layers and split screens – impose on the recorded images sensible modifications. Emblematic of the artist’s investigations into the procedures regulating visual perception are the sequence in which the screen is divided in two reproducing feet and heads that do not match each other and that of the escalators going backwards. Once more, such devices induce displacements in the viewers’ minds constantly engaged into a process of building their own storylines out of the impulses they receive from watching the video.
In the following work, Trafic, 2002, the artist’s research process of questioning perception becomes focused on a system of binary opposition. The visual space of the screen is horizontally split in two halves. Urban landscapes made of different cities scroll on the top and on the bottom. They move in two different directions, from left to right and vice versa. This opposition in movement is amplified in the subject matter chosen: sunny urban landscapes above are opposed to the rainy ones in the lower section. Significantly, the incessant flow of images – the footage was recorded from ground vehicles in movement – supplemented by the large projection amazes and confuses the viewers. As a consequence, they are stupefied and disoriented, like the feeling one gets when he or she observes the incessant current of traffic on a busy road. Their eyes struggle to keep up with the linear progression of the speeding cars, turning this experience into a game between the eye and the mind.
Whereas movement is the key factor in questioning the viewers’ perceptive faculties, in the subsequent work Intercolor 32 v. 3.1, 2002, Dementieva’s visual strategy is centred on the contraposition between black and white footage – incidentally, a deliberate allusion to Film Noir – and the insertion of a frame in colour, which lasts for a very brief span of time. Such a pattern causes an effect of puzzling suspension in the viewer. Once again, here the mystery – some sort of glass (or clear plastic) surface hides something behind resembling a human shape – is only hinted at and it cannot be ever solved.

The following year Dementieva released the most psychedelic of her single-channel videos, Autoportr 21, 2003. This is also the work where the most intriguing scenes of mystery are directly associated with the realm of figurative arts, in the specific a painting. Close-ups of colourful abstract motifs painted on a canvas dominate the visual field. These details impinge themselves upon the viewer’s imaginations as primitive signs whose interpretation depends upon the reactions of the subconscious. Throughout the whole video the atmosphere is tense and dense at the same time. A mirror ball, blinding lights, and a rotating wheel are some of the key-objects to follow in this carnival of images that Dementieva has selected. The more the viewers delve into the video, the more these object lose their grip on the real world and produce instead an eerie sense of discomfort. Like in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) details become here the key to understanding (or, rather, try to understand). At the same time, they are also the key to enter an oneiric world; a land mixing reality with fantasy. It is relevant to point out that deliberately the sensations proved by the experience of watching come from everyday objects that do not lose their recognisability in the process of digital rendering that the artist performed to build her story. It could be affirmed, then, that Autoportr 21 seems to move along the lines of Sigmund Freud’s principles formulated in his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), where the familiar becomes disquieting, subverting the sense of security and creating feeling of unrest and instability.

Whereas Lynch offers a valid substratum in the interpretation of Autoportr 21, another director whose cinematography tends to disrupt the conventionalities of canonical narrativeness stands as a significant reference in Dementieva’s video Not Unexpected Encounters (2003), Alain Resnais. In particular, the encounters taking place in this work are told with that grainy black and white and those repeated pans of the video camera over the same person that remind of the French director’s Last Year in Marienbad (1961). For what concerns its theoretical valences, whereas Freud’s Uncanny appears to be of pivotal importance in the previous work, Not Unexpected Encounters could be considered a visual investigation on Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the gaze”. Dementieva here seems to agree with the French philosopher illustrating that the gaze belongs to the object (the encountered people), rather than to the subject (the camera looking at them). As a consequence, this video questions the interelations between the camera’s gaze and the extra-diegetic gaze of the people protagonists of the rendezvous looking straight in the camera’s eye – that is to say, both the director’s eye and the spectators’ eye. Ultimately, the gaze becomes the epiphany, as James Joyce would put it, “the sudden revelation of the whatness of a thing”. It progressively reveals, by means of repetitions that turn chance into routine, that the elusiveness of reality. Furthermore, to underline the complexity of this work it cannot be omitted that in telling her modernist tale, Dementieva does not refrain from adding one extra tessera that makes the mystery of the repeated encounters even more intricate. At the very end she inserts a brief sequence of a dead female body lying on the floor whose only visible parts are the legs. Significantly, it lasts for just a moment. The inattentive viewer can even miss it because deliberately the artist has not employed any editing device to put it in evidence.

That same year, the artist completed a video that, on the surface, is fully rooted into the real world and does not question its solidity. This is a work that is much closer to documentary than fiction, China’s Diary, 2003. Obviously, China is the country where she can never pass for a local. Her somatic features would constantly tell that she does not belong by birth to that place. Therefore, when visiting this land, the role that she performed was that of the acute observer. She looked around her and wrote with her camera a diary of her wanderings. Once back to her studio, out of about ten hours of recorded material, she selected some of the entries in her diary in order to compose the story of one day in that land. Symptomatically, in doing so, she does not relegate herself to the mere role of telling what she had witnessed while she was in that foreign country. To start with, she rejects the conventional way of displaying taped footage by splitting the screen into two or even three sections to show simultaneously more excerpts of her diary. Beside the aesthetic qualities of the compositional arrangement of each scene, the thematic notion that Dementieva is here playing with is one of time. As a matter of fact, one of the most striking aspect that caught her attention when she was in China was that time there passed by at a different speed from the way it does in the West. In the East, somehow, the pace of everyday life becomes slower: breakfast in a café and the act of washing one’s hair seem to go on for ever, even the sun seems to take much more time to set.
After visiting China, the artist goes back to her homeland, Russia, and to her hometown, Moscow in the following video Videomort (2004). To a certain extent, the same willingness to narrate the story of a place that motivates her previous video can be found here. Clearly, in this case she is no longer a foreigner. On the other hand, this is the place where she was born and where she grew up. However, there is still the same attentive look at assimilating what surrounds her that marks her journey to China. She takes in Moscow with the eyes of somebody who is struggling to recognise something familiar in what she is witnessing. Her hometown has sensibly changed its appearance in the span of time of about three years that her photographs document. The speed at which this has happened is amazing and appalling at the same time. In the crazy race to modernization of the beginning years of the new millennium the city appears to have permanently lost a vibrant part of its past. The title itself, Videomort, stands as a subtle ironic take at these disquieting changes – changes that to the artist have the same character of a mystery. Therefore, it would not be an incongruence to interpret the slideshow of bizarre photographs and the white light flare signalling the passage from one videomort to the other as sentences from a monologue about a place that in itself ambiguous and puzzling.

A link between performance – one of the fundamental forms of expression for Alexandra Dementieva – is Reactor, 2005, given that it is a single-channel video that the artist extrapolated from the performative act with the same title. The visual field is dominated by a white screen and a vertical line constantly “breaking” it, like in a Lucio Fontana’s painting. Now and then the tear becomes wider, as the dance of the line becomes wilder. At some point, it even takes the form of a stained surface as it was a photocopied sheet covered with spots of ink at the margins. Whereas in her previous videos the mystery was created though the presentation of real objects and people – regardless of the degree of digital modification that they underwent in the editing room – here the mystery becomes absolute, abstract at the highest degree. Accordingly, the experience of watching the large projection becomes even more confusing and intense. The subconscious to which the images talk to is stimulated in such a manner that resembles certain dreams which have no consistency and no links with the real world. They belong instead to a realm of pure visuality that words necessarily fail to describe.

To a certain extent, a dreamlike atmosphere also reigns over Dementieva’s following video, Do You Remember? (2005), although this time the action takes place in a real space. The artist once again resorts to grainy black and white to tell this new story. The opening sequence of an empty room where a memorable event – probably a clandestine love story – took place brings to memory glimpses of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958). The second instance seems to fit even better when the story progresses and the suspense becomes more intense, when in the black and white pattern adopted the shadows start to dominate over the light. Significantly, the artist keeps away from any Expressionistic assonances of dreadful terrors lurking half-hidden in some supernatural being. On the other hand, people are almost absent here. Certainly, this video appears to be one of the most complex in the artist’s videography, given that it is also a visual essay on the incidence of primitive signs, ritual practices, and, in the specific, on the way a given sequence of numbers is able to deeply affect reality. In the flow of images, there are in fact rites about numbers and primordial structures of a world in balance between the real and the dream. A world that in its essence epitomises Dementieva’s whole videography where mystery, suspense, oneirism are mixed with reality in the constant attempt to challenge visual perception in the viewers.

In conclusion, it would not be inappropriate to state that in Dementieva’s videography every and each video is above all a psychoanalytic experience for the viewer – an experience in which the digital interpolation becomes the key to communicate with the subconscious. Each of them is a study of dreams, phantasies and myths disseminated with puzzle and riddles associable with several historical and cultural references. The spectators are constantly invited to perceive beyond the literal of what they see. Each time they found themselves into psycho-acoustic environments that challenge – and, to a certain extent, even hypnotise – their mental activities. Dementieva manages to elicit a state of intellectual uncertainty in which the stories she tells can never be grasped as a whole, but they can only be perceived through the impressions that the edited images solicit. Ultimately, through the “séance” of watching it on the big screen objects and situations that on the surface might appear arbitrary and meaningless are recuperated by the subconscious the same way a poem (more than a novel or a short story) acts on the reader imagination. Or, in other words, each time it is like being back to 1895 and experiencing the mystifying arrival of the Lumière’s train at the station of La Ciotat.