Date: 05.09.2018
Beginning: 19:00

Caught Reality

It was the Soviet assembler Dziga Vertov, who in his stubborn documentary effort to capture lived reality in its genuine purity, set up an imperative for himself – “to catch life red-handed”. It is this hard-to-define act of being caught, which does not have firm and clear contours, whose ambiguity led to a whole variety of forms and procedures of presenting reality in the history of the audiovisual media.

Documaginationis one of them.

 

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Documaginationis a creative procedure moving between a document of everydayness, a diary of the seen and an associative montage.

Documaginationmakes use of methodological procedures of the so-called spontaneous film, though it does not strictly observe any doctrine of that stream.

Documaginationdeliberately avoids any specific formal definition, as it does not wish to offer anyaesthetic clue howto read the seen within this genre.

Documaginationattempts the question how far a recording of an authentic reality can contribute to a better understanding of the reality just lived.

Documaginationthen is an attempt to sharpen the viewer’s apprehension of everyday reality.

Documaginationis meant to instigatethe viewer’s active participation.

 

Spontaneity and randomness

The creative principle as suggested above ensues from a spontaneous gesture of the observer toward a random immediate situation. Spontaneity is thus an unprepared and unplanned response to an impulse from external reality, and has not a defined topic as such. If the topic is not predefined, it is similarly not possible to define beforehand the reason, the motivation for observing this spontaneous responseto an external impulse. Thus it is a procedure of certain psychological automatism, within which the captured reality is a recording of what the author has subjectivelyseen and experienced.

The principle of spontaneous origin of the captured is accentuated also in the postproduction process, which mostly respects chronology oftheactualityrecorded.  The information coming from the situation’scontents becomes subject to alater reception both by the author and the viewer. Random situations lead to questioning the core of the situation as such. Here situation becomes the key to information, however obtained by the viewer only after he or she free themselves from expecting a conventional interpretation key the author might offer them in his work. At the same time the situation proposesa space to ponder one’s own internalized patterns of expectation or,generally spoken,a space for one’s own introspection. Ideologically the artwork deals with the visual theory of Roland Barthes, namely the participation of the viewer.

 

Unconditioned apparatus

In the given case theroomfor a free spontaneous response is conditioned by the immediate availability of recording equipment, which is, in case of my creation, well servedby an inbuiltrecording apparatus inmy cell phone. This recording done by means of the smart phone miniature facility ultimatelyfulfills theconditions of the so-called unconditioned apparatus. Unlike classical filmmaking,the character of thus recorded situation is being essentially changed and recording conditions strikingly extended.