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Jean-Noël Aoun (LB) / “Emit” - 2006

.: Statement

“Emit tackles with the language problem/solutions of representation systems and mediums (perspective representation of painting and photography, and representation of time in video specifically), and its direct role in determining the modality of vision, and hence in rationalizing our perception of space and time. The fixed frame in which very few movements occur acts like a photographic image and loses its depth. The blue wall of the room looks like the blue screen used in filming to later add an extra-diegetic background, an extra-diegetic depth to the scene, therefore acting as a latent illusion, as the ghost of depth, suspending the location of the space, keeping it a purely filmic space. The “blue screen space” is space as a pre-condition of any phenomenon, and resonates with the Kantian space (space of perspective representation) defined as the necessary precondition of any possible phenomenon. The estrangement is further accentuated by the props and the lighting equipment visible at the edge of the frame, staging the scene, betraying it. The simple, everyday-life actions that are performed in the blue room involve very little movement. This allows for the reversed filmic time to manifest its uncanny presence in the micro-movements that compose the general one, perceived and rationalized into a narrative, meaningful/purposeful act. If perception occurs when the eye stops functioning as an organ and starts producing language, i.e. reading/understanding the space/scene, this video is poetic in the sense that it operates short-circuits in this language, it constructs brief and recurrent conflicts between meaning and form within the language. In discursive language it is essential that the meaning kill the form, it is the fatal price to pay, and it is the only way we are able to have a discussion. Kids play the old game of repeating endlessly a word to ultimately burst out laughing. In fact what happens is that they laugh when, through repetition, they dispel the word from its meaning and truly hear it; when form kills meaning. Listening to the sound of the words would be fatal to a conversation. Poetry, on the other hand, puts the two (meaning and form) in conflict, in an endless war of recurrent deaths and resurrections, the limit of which is silence. Written silence. Spoken silence. In a way it shifts our perception. Instead of seeing through language we see language through a short-circuit in language. Emit was one of my attempts to construct such short-circuits in video to understand its/it’s language, to touch it, in a way, to create a haptic (video) image, a video image that stops our eye at it’s surface, an image to see video through, not an image to see through video.”
-Jean-Noël Aoun

.: Biography

Jean-Noël Aoun lives and works in Beirut (LB). He has studied at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA).

.: Selected Exhibitions

April 2006, Group Exhibition, Zirconia – Incrusted Tweezers, Video installation, Dôme théâtre, Beirut (LB)
October 2005, Group Exhibition, “Sur-faces d’espaces”, photography series, Project La Seine-ALBA, Dekwane (LB)
March 2005, Group Exhibition, ”Eriounios (Bringer of Luck)”, video installation, Centre Azariyyé, Beirut (LB)
January 2005, Festival, “Emit”, video, 2eme Festival International de Film et Vidéo de Création, 2006, Beirut (LB)

 

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