TRANSMISSION ART ARCHIVE

Flo Rounds A Corner

Ken Jacobs, 1999, 6 min, color, silent. Courtesy EAI
Writes Mark McElhatten: "The cast is in flux — the animate and the inanimate get double billed with that dynamic duo — Push and Pull. If matter has consciousness and has renounced movement as Henri Bergson suggests, in order to conserve energy, then here we have a dramatic apostasy. A broken vow of stasis, a flood of energy. What beautiful instability and pulsation in this floating world off a hinge, drawn through invisible bellows, exhaled, exultant. Figure and ground (such a quaint term for what we really see) do a slow motion see-saw on shifting tectonic plates, and fold into Cezanne-like origami. If this dance weren't so meticulous, so slow, so molecular it would describe a calamity. But in fact this happens every day, every moment in the blink of an eye. Tilts with perfect pitch. The eponymous Flo moves slanted and enchanted down a street in Taormina, Italy — as casual, momentous and as 'on time' as the Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat that rounded the corner of another century. A landmark work."

Production: Harvestworks Digital Media Arts, NYC. Technical Support: Jane Johnston, Mindy Weisberger, Shari Geffen at All In Production, Inc. Thanks to Teormina Film Festival, Harvestworks, Rockefeller Foundation, Flo. Eternalism System Patent granted.

(Text courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Visit www.eai.org for complete biography, work descriptions, images, ordering information, and more.)