Description
This nine-minute video work was realized for the publication “Networked Actor Theory.” It consists of a non-commented line-up of nine sequences. Each of the nine successive clips shows a laptop on a table in an apartment by the Baltic Sea during Midsummer. On the full screen of the laptop, nine different gifs appear, one after another. The gifs are altered versions of photographs of diverse seaside landscapes that Roumagnac shot in the Basque Country, Finland, Japan, and Portugal over the course of his doctoral artistic research project Reacclimating the Stage (Skenomorphoses). Each gif, which is titled after a theater or opera piece that is set by a sea, presents a “double nature”; each one of them enables the viewer to see a sea landscape referring to the “dramatic” representation of what we used to call “nature” on theater and opera backdrops and the simultaneous computational alteration of the same landscapist stage framing. Re-shooting the displayed gifs with a digital camera through the surface of the computer screen gives a pattern-conflict moiré effect on the final rendering, whose canvas-like stripes may evoke the materiality of painted stage backdrops. The work proposes thus to trigger a contemplative reflection on how the representational closure of the notion of stage backdrop, and, metonymically, of the notion of environment, opens to the abyss of their algorithmically determined double.