VISUAL REALIZATIONS

[ VISUAL INSTALLATIONS ]

Lostery 3 2022

Listen to Ipso primero (a 6-channel electroacoustic work played with the visual installation)
YouTube - Animated video
Portfolio of the installation (PDF)

The visual installation Lostery 3 uses the same kind of presentation as Lostery 2. It is meant to be a surrounding of the musical work performed, Ipso primero  for electronics.

The title Lostery condenses the words "lost" and "Lottery". It expresses a rather pessimistic state of mind according to which what has been brought into play leads most of the time to failure. 
It accounts for the social and economic crisis that we have been experiencing over several years and for the increasing inequality between people.

Lostery questions two structural parameters which have a significant impact on our lives - on the one hand, the gearwheels of the societal machine in which we are carried along and which mostly conditions our destinies, and on the other hand, the notion of chance which plays a part in the path that we will or will not be able to follow. It divides individuals between the more or less lucky or unlucky according to the socio-political and economic system of the country in which they were born (more or less favoured and equalitarian), their life in a country at peace or at war, the socio-cultural level of the family they have been brought up in, the possibility of studying or not, the greater or lesser freedom of choice given to them, etc.

While the installation Lostery 2 included visual elements and objects related to the lottery, Lostery 3 is related to poker game. The abstract animated machinery projected onto a screen is made of interlocked graphical motifs that evoke a complex circuit in motion. Like in the previous installation, this visual counterpoint to the sound mechanics of the piece proposes a binary system, but this time with white motifs on a black background instead of black motifs on a white background. 
These games of chance and money put us in a position of winning ("jackpot") or losing ("jack shit", "nothing" in slang). It is double or quits, all or nothing.

Derived from real objects (a poker case with dice and chips), the built objects (painted discs with various dimensions, small painted wooden cubes) seem to proliferate in space and to invade the room, thus reflecting the repetitive gestures and the obsessional and feverish state of mind of the players while immersed in games.

What is chance? Are we born on the right or the wrong side? How far can we really decide for our life? Both despair and hope can be discerned in this compulsion to play such games and to try to change our daily life and destiny.

The accumulation of the sound and visual connections induces the perception of a kinetic and bruitist whole in which the boundaries between the psychic mechanics and that of the objects disappears. Which place is it possible to find in such a system or, inversely, how is it possible to step aside and out of it?

Gesso; acrylic paintings (black, white); palette knives and brushes; acrylic markers (white, black); triptych of paintings (3 cotton canvases: 100x50 cm); built objects: 34 painted styrofoam discs (diameter varying from 10cm to 25cm); 20 small painted wooden cubes (10x10cm); about 20 decorated small white plastic chips; 10 decorated mini dice; black metal poker case with chips and dice; a 9'20 animated video (computer drawing) with music, projected with a loop onto a screen or a white wall (1980x1020 px).

Clara Maïda, November 2022

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