The video above is a short trailer.
The full version is 4:57 long and is available as pay-per-view on www.visualcontainer.tv
-> click here for the video on VisualcontainerTV
Screenings and presentations:
• March 8-24, 2024: Corporeazione. La sacralità di una lotta moderna, Palazzo Caccia Canali, Sant’Oreste RM, Italy.
• February 23, 2023: Screening of 12 videos by Maria Korporal in the context of Premio Borgo Video, curated by gallery La scala d’oro, Sala Dionigi (Chiesa Valdese), Rome, Italy.
• November 3-18, 2022: IMAGE PLAY ► International Video Art Festival 2022 (PT), curated by Hernando Urrutia.
• April 1, 2022: QRC.PRJCT Official Selection, K.O.T.E.S. (Booze Cooperativa), Athens, Greece.
• December 15-21, 2021: Cineaste International Film Festival of India (CIFFI), Noida, Delhi NCR, India.
• April 23 – May 16, 2021: UPDATE 21, Gallery VBK, Berlin.
• October 30 – November 1, 2020: contemporary art ruhr (C.A.R.), INNOVATIVE ART FAIR, Essen.
Our social and private life has undergone a drastic turn towards digitalisation as a consequence of the pandemic that originated in the beginning of 2020. Human contacts now often are replaced by video-chat Zoom or Jitsi.
In this video I try to show the human experience of loneliness and impotence during their „meetings“ in cyberspace. Even if the light image accurately depicts the person, eye contact is impossible. We look at a screen that shows a simulacra of some other human being and of ourselves.
The video develops seemless in three stages: in the “introduction” images of video chats trasfer proper light beams from chat rooms into real rooms, followed by what could be called the phase of “creation”, in which a lonely person who’s chatting tries to pull the simulacrum out of the light beams, zoom it into her room and bring it to life, and thirdly the phase “longing”, in which the eternal longing for the deep contact with the other is expressed.
In his science fiction novel Neuromancer, published in 1984, William Gibson wrote the revealing phrase: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation …” In the last decades we saw this global development coming about, but the Covid virus has accelerated this significantly. However, the video goes further back in time. Cinema lovers will unfailingly recognize the references to „Maschinen-Maria“ of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), another visionary of the technological future. And the profiles in the last scene, which hesitantly approach each other and break away again and again, are ancient Greco-Roman sculptures, simulacra from the cradle of our culture.
title: ZoOm into my Room
technique: Experimental video and animation
length: 4’57”
year: 2020
music: “Blue Funk Hypertransit” (excerpts) by Edoardo Pistolesi Somigli
concept, images, animation, effects and montage: Maria Korporal
© Maria Korporal 2020
Edoardo Pistolesi Somigli is co-founder & Station Manager @ Dots Unlimited Radio, a multichannel webradio dedicated to free music, sound research and new forms of communication and language: www.duradio.net
Knob-twiddler in the field of experimental music, fond of all possible links between sound and psychology, undergoing multiple ambient/noise/psychoacoustic creative projects plus -within the scientific community- currently approaching sounds and frequencies to be applied in several alternative cognitive-behavioral therapies in the treatment of various forms of OCD, freely and originally inspired by some tests conducted by Jean Piaget in the 40s of last century.
Stills from the video:
