Marco Brambilla
The history of humankind is illustrated as a vast side-scrolling video mural depicting the spectacle of human conflict across time through the lens of cinema.
Set against a stark, monochromatic background with a hairless Poly as the centerpiece, the video gives you an unsettling feeling that something disturbing is stirring beneath her initial placidity. Poly then takes us through a range of emotions of what can only be described as a carthartic episode before ending on the same unnerving note it began with. Brambilla composes the video brilliantly, creating mesh-like layers of Poly’s face that scatter and converge as he explores the idea of mulitplicity within the human psyche.
Civilization is a multi-layered tableau of interconnecting images that illustrates a contemporary, satirical take on the concepts of eternal punishment and celestial reward. More than 300 individual channels of looped video are blended into an expansive landscape that continuously scrolls upward, from the depths of hell to the gates of heaven.
Cathedral was filmed at the Toronto Eaton Centre mega mall during the Christmas shopping season. Here is consumerism as spectacle: Throngs of shoppers circulate in slow motion, in superimposed and multi-layered images that transform the mall into a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory space. The cyclical montage is inspired by the time and motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth, which date from the American industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century. The video is installed in a mirrored box, bringing the video into three dimensions and further multiplying the images.
In this computer-generated “time-lapse study” of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, the Eagle spacecraft and the American flag planted alongside are shown as they slowly disintegrate. Beginning with the original image transmitted on television, the video compresses years into seconds, until nothing remains but a pile of rubble—a cynical commentary on the decay of American idealism from the ’60s to the present day. The sound is taken from recorded radio transmissions between mission control and the lunar base, but the dialogue has been removed; all that remains are the beeping radio carrier signals, static, and interference.
'Sync' is made up of sampled images from sex scenes in mainstream and adult films. The formulaic and often derivative nature of the way this subject is interpreted in cinema is emphasised, creating a strong subliminal impression which gradually builds to a state of sensory overload. 'Sync' uses samples as short as single frames edited together to create the impression of motion. The original continuity and narrative in the source material is eliminated, and a new visual choreography emerges.
A compilation of erotic films intended to illuminate the points where art meets sexuality.
Sync features three screens of densely edited film footage, each organized around a different theme—fight scenes, sex scenes, and theater audiences—all progressing at the rate of 12 shots per second. Overlaying all three is a violently percussive audio montage. The result is a new visual choreography that rapidly builds to a state of sensory overload, emphasizing how viewers develop a resistance to graphic sex and brutality, both in the movies and in the news media in general. Only Syn Watch is included here, but you can find an excerpt of Sync Sex in the Destricted collection.
The multi-channel video installation HalfLife juxtaposes surveillance footage of video gamers in cyber-cafés playing the popular video game, ‘Counter-Strike’, with a live video feed of the game they are playing. The surveillance channel shows their expressions from the cross-hairs’ point-of-view while the game engine channel captures their virtual actions inside the game-world and presents the interplay and interactivity between both.
Film footage of Sylvester Stallone in Brambilla's 1993 debut feature-film, Demolition Man, is re-photographed through the gate of a 35mm projector and presented as the Sequel. The movement of the film gradually begins to slow until the light from the projector lamp begins to disintegrate the celluloid film.
In the carnival act “Wall of Death,” first performed in the 1930s, a motorcyclist rides around the inside of a wooden drum, maintaining a delicate state of equilibrium between centrifugal force and gravity. The video is made up of a series of motion loops that become progressively shorter, creating the illusion of continuous motion: The rider is caught in a never-ending, never decelerating circle. The editing technique, inspired by the Kinetoscope films popular during the time the act was widely performed.
Filmed at John F. Kennedy Airport, Approach catches passengers arriving from long-haul flights as they enter the terminal looking for contact with someone familiar. The footage was shot on camcorders equipped with telephoto lenses and the footage is slowed down to emphasize the moment of transition that each subject experiences as they arrive. The installation consists of 4 screens, with a 1-second delay between the identical images in each screen.
Inspired by Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), Superstar was commissioned by Creative Time to be presented on the Jumbotron screen in Times Square, New York City. The subject appears perpetually frozen in time while the document of the moment itself slowly descends. Filmed in a pre-Matrix era, the performance in Superstar was captured with 180 cameras mounted in a 360 degree ring that show a 1/500 second wedge of time.
Shot from the point of view of a passenger aircraft, Getaway begins with an aerial view of a generic industrial district and ends with a landing on the main runway at Los Angeles’s LAX airport. The video is presented on a small LCD screen in a plastic setting designed after a 1970s Pan Am airline tray—a relic from a time when passengers could fly in style
Filmed in 35mm at nine revolving restaurants across North America—including ones in Seattle, Las Vegas, St. Louis, and New York—Cyclorama presents nine panoramas side by side in a cylindrical enclosure that mimics the restaurants’ architecture, creating the sense of one continuous, moving landscape. The sun rises at the same moment on each screen, erasing time zones and providing a 360-degree view of the Western horizon.
A rich brat (Alicia Silverstone) fakes her own kidnapping, but in the process ends up locked in the trunk of a car that gets stolen.
Simon Phoenix, a violent criminal cryogenically frozen in 1996, escapes during a parole hearing in 2032 in the utopia of San Angeles. Police are incapable of dealing with his violent ways and turn to his captor, who had also been cryogenically frozen after being wrongfully accused of killing 30 innocent people while apprehending Phoenix.
The work follows Greek philosopher Galen’s classification of four personality dispositions—sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic. In the film, Blanchett is seen playing four characters, each representing one of the temperaments. Denoted by color, we see the actor’s face appear on the screen bathed in yellow portraying sanguine, red for choleric, blue as melancholic, and green for phlegmatic. As Blanchett’s personalities are displayed in a series of synchronized images, she begins establishing each distinguished character.
