the carousel
soda_jerk |
the roundabout of life and deathCulture-jamming duo Soda_Jerk is well-known for savvy video works that laugh in the face of copyright and tease audiences with media moments of familiarity made strange, dislocated, morphed and re-combined into unfamiliar configurations. Diverging from the trademark structure of the video installation, Soda_Jerk (sisters Dan and Dominique Angeloro) recently tuned their talents to creating a video performance-lecture titled The Carousel, premiering at Fremantle Arts Centre. In this work the cinematic apparatus was revealed to manufacture the life of ghosts, not only in the presence of dead actors forever immortalised on the silver screen, but also in the machinations of the media industry toying with death—presaging, manipulating and creating life in defiance of death. The Carousel began somewhere in the 23rd Century with a clip from Michael Anderson's 1976 science-fiction film Logan’s Run. The segment presented an answer to over-population in the form of a carousel lottery to determine death or renewal on one’s 30th birthday. Such ontological concerns set the scene for the content to follow. Soda_Jerk talked the audience through a series of cinematic clips exploring the uncanny relationship between death and un-death, or immortal return via cinema, and the unsettling parallels between the virtual spaces of cinema and actual spaces of real life. A remarkable array of examples of this spectacle of death spilled forth, including Heather O’Rourke in the Poltergeist series, Brandon Lee in The Crow, Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bruce Lee in Game of Death and Nancy Marchand in The Sopranos. What unites each of these characters is that they continue acting new scenes from beyond the grave. They are doubled, cleverly concealed, written into plots that never reveal their faces, replicated with cardboard cut-outs and digitally re-animated as virtual spectres. The techniques employed to assure their ongoing screen presence are astounding, the cinematic apparatus revealing an ethical void as the need to please audiences appears to hold more value than respect for the departed. The fundamental object status of actors is made literally manifest. Soda_Jerk ploughed this territory and also revealed that such manipulations parallel a wider age-old trend in society to push the quest for immortality, the Frankensteinian desire to play god and cheat death. Film is, as the artists emphasised, already a repository where the dead are kept alive, but re-animating the dead of the real world takes this to a whole other dimension. The video performance lecture format effectively enabled connections between disparate movie moments to unfurl by way of explanation. Soda_Jerk provided a narrative voice to the uncanny or insidious background to the scenes before us—an all too sombre reminder of the reality at the heart of the relation between cinema and death. Laetitia Wilson Soda_Jerk, Performance Lecture: The Carousel, Fremantle Arts Centre, July 2; www.sodajerk.com.au/ |
soda_jerkYour practice is predominantly video installation. Why choose the format of a performance lecture for The Carousel? |