Una piedra negra was a project from 2005 to 2017 that later evolved into We Were Humanity. It was a search for the heart of noise. Like my current project, it was composed of videos, paintings and music.
Its central axis was to find a new way to build a cinematographic narrative leaving aside the linearity of cinema. In that sense, each one of the pieces that constituted it (which could be a video, a painting or live audiovisual performances) was a scene from a movie in eternal Work in Progress. Unlike traditional cinema, where movies remain the same once they are released, the disassembled narrative of a Una piedra negra offered scenes that could appear many times in different forms.
In Una piedra negra I combined my interest in noise and glitches or digital errors, low-definition digital graphics -influenced by 90s video games-, experimental music and rotoscoping. It’s short films, paintings and instalations were shown at Telefonica foundation, Modern Art Museum of Buenos Aires, Foster Catena Gallery, at festivals Art Futura, Robot and Trimarchi, Wrong Bienal among others.
In 2009, the argentinian curator Rafael Cippolini wrote the text “Dinamophone’s poem” about some of my short films.
Everything is recorded somewhere. But how? The identity of any noise de- pends on its amplification and the choice in equalizing it (in our case, visu- ally). Unlike sound, the evidence of noise implies a low vocabulary, an inter- vened grammar. Mateo Amaral Junco describes his film in episodes as a noisy abstract science fiction feature film.
In the atoms of those vases. Like the characters in JG Ballard’s short story The Voices of Time and Jonathan Rivers, star of Geoffrey Sax’s film White Noise, the main protagonist of the Una piedra negra narrative is a Champo- lion out to capture shrouded pasts. in the DNA of the most diverse noises. And for this it crosses all kinds of landscapes, interiors and exteriors. The noise information is intercepted at each opportunity with animation and rotoscoping (a technique that uses video sequences as a basis for designing movements) and through the strategic use of flat colors articulated in polygons, thus citing the aesthetics of the video game Another World (1991). ). Archaeologies of digital graphics.
Punk samples. Noise art, that is, a work about noise. If for a long time noise was considered an error, a technological residue, those times are already very distant. The noise abstraction of a good part of the images in Una piedra negra is pure distortion resulting from voluntary changes in the software; digital hermeneutics of the inorganic induced by video compressions that drag col- ors towards abstraction.
Recording tasks. “In order to reduce the enormous amount of information that a sequence of photos that make up a video means, codecs such as mp4 only save the complete image every certain number of frames, and in others they only save the parts that have changed. I force the process to use wrong complete frames to generate motion, thus producing distortion. That is, two images that have no relation to each other merge creating a new one, which absorbs the colors and shapes of one but moves like the other. The process that I am using for the production of this film is comparable to the character’s work on the space station. I collect information of different kinds. On the one hand, the parts that are already made, animations, sound and music, which I then use in different stages of assembly. From these montages new needs arise, suggesting new scenes. On the other hand, the ideas for the various scenes, situations or loose elements and the relationship between them to form the film as a unit. I always carry a little notebook where I write down every time one appears.” (Amaral Junco dixit).
The editing room of our invented memories. None of the images that retain the past in our heads survives without modifying others of its kind. The sensory narratives of the past that we store are a remix of personal memory juxtaposed with concepts. Amaral Junco knows that each time we access a memory we alter it, modifying the network of memories that defines our construction of reality. We are happy: each time we hoard more and more noises to look at.
