Sintoniza Ruido was a series of short films that I made from 2002 to 2005. In them I investigated the effects of video distortion through intentional errors (Glitchs) generated in experimental 3D files and animations.
In 2009, the book Tecnica:video, which addresses the panorama of Argentine video art, included a text by Matias Capelli about my short film Almacenado libros (Stored Books).
A space station in which a scientist is dedicated to recording the surrounding void, storing the waves that arrive from the most diverse and remote places and times. Such is the main scene around which the rest orbits, the central nerve of the feature film on which Mateo Amaral has been working for several years, and of which the video Stored Books constitutes one of its asteroids. It is an extensive “abstract science fiction” animation composed of independent fragments that manage to string together from the resonances of certain vectors that Amaral, slowly but surely, detects and reformulates again. Snippets of sights and sounds: Arcade (and archaic) video games like Another World, imposing Herzogian landscapes and post-apocalyptic sci-fi wallpapers, and some stretches that lean decidedly towards abstraction. But in each and every one of them, he does not fail to highlight the faults of technology: flashes of static, intermittence, hyper-compressed low-definition video and sound, the dyslexic babble of extemporaneous machines. This somewhat distrustful and, why not, somewhat dilapidated use of the technique is similar to the one that Amaral usually adopts, also, in his work with Oligatega Numeric, the artistic group of which he is a part. Stored books is a piece of noise at times opaque, one of the most resistant to the narrative dimension within a larger series (the feature film) that, instead, tends more and more towards characters with recognizable contours, scenes and more consistent stories. In this video it is the scale of the distortion that tenses the arc that magnetizes the images and sounds in their temporal succession; a faulty valve or a restless hand - that of the scientist locked up in the space station, that of Mateo Amaral - that never seems to stay too long without reorienting the antenna. As if certain information were hidden in the noise, in the interference, randomly stored, the flat color pixels burst, accelerate, erratically, with binary uncertainty when the software is forced by those who manipulate it to make mistakes; fluid particles dissolve, disintegrate, move like colored shadows. Memories of forests and cities fester and overprint themselves on a hard drive of faulty clusters: a phenomenology of audiovisual perception for 8-bit consoles.