Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an artist of the wireless era

In Tropical Malady’s final credits, the thanks list contains names like Brian Eno and Pierre Huygue. The first one is a very well-known musician who, among his vast repertoire, explores different kinds of soundscapes and owns many remarkable works of ambient music. The second one is a video-maker whose Rear Window’s remake, shot in video camera with non-professional actors, is an excellent example of how contemporary video-art has been dealing, creatively and provocatively, with cinema icons – Huygue’s video, called Remake (1995), may be seen as a real predecessor of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho 98.

But what do they have in common with Apichatpong Weerasethakul? The answer is simple. You just have to think about Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady or Syndromes and a Century: Apichatpong builds an immersive environment comparable to Brian Eno’s ambient music, and his films are aesthetical-conceptualistic adventures just like Huygue’s videos.

We can easily say that Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the most important and interesting artists of the wireless era (the other one would be Michael Mann, but for completely different routes). He creates a fluid space-time, an unlimited connection of different levels of reality; and he transforms the act of disrespecting the border between narration and purely sensorial installations into an art. Mysterious Object at Noon shows this structure very clearly: every shot is an open field where the film can both reflect on its process and replace its mise en scène by the constitution of a primordial space-time, a primeval sensory experience (less dramaturgy than cosmology, so to speak). With this fusion of empirical wildness and sophisticated artistic device, he restores a lost paradise of the visible world.

But in the interactive video-installation Black Air, shown in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s 37^th edition, something bursts into this paradise.

(The installation was actually conceived by four other Thai artists: Pimpaka Towira, Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Koichi Shimizu and Jakrawal Nilthamrong. Although Apichatpong was “only” an advisor, some of his strongest artistic options are there.)      

Black Air is divided over two spaces – as in his films, it’s a sort of founding gesture for Apichatpong: to find the structure of something by dividing it in two halfs. In the first room, there are two projections, one on each wall, and dozens of buttons “falling” from the roof. The biggest screen shows ordinary images of Thailand: townscapes, iconic places, panoramas, postcards in motion. On the smallest screen, we see still pictures of birds, plants, bucolic areas, natural beauties. For each button you press, a different sound is added to the environment: sounds of weather, jungle sounds, animal voices, noise pollution... An increasing soundscape that constantly re-signifies the images you’re seeing. Unexpectedly, Apichatpong opens his “narrative” with the elements that – at least in Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady – used to be in the second part. The peaceful place, the spells of nature, the transitory sensations/meanings, the sensorial-temporal flow, now it all comes in the first half. You feel surrounded by a hybrid atmosphere. Most of the time it’s a peaceful, relaxing atmosphere – but some kind of disturbing paradox is already there to be felt.

When you move to the other room, through a short and dark corridor, the installation changes radically. This second place is much bigger, and it’s immersed in silence and darkness. There are even more buttons. Now, every time you press a button, an image appears on one of the four huge screens located in the room. This time we experience an image-surround, and the atmosphere is no longer peaceful or relaxing. On the contrary, we see images of violence, made with hand-held video camera, with a very web-like look. “The pictures are borrowed from clandestine recordings of the so-called Takbai incident. A dramatic incident from the recent history of Thailand in which many demonstrators in the rebellious south died when they were transported piled up in military trucks. The event took place on 25 October 2004, but the images are still subject to censorship”, Gertjan Zuilhof explains in the IFFR’s website.      

The tragic incident is there, popping on big screens, through images captured from different points of view, which brings the dual aspect of simultaneity and instability. A “real size” environment of Playstation's war games? Maybe... But much more than that, too. Saved from oblivion, the video registrations can open themselves to our perception in that dark ambience. Whether the images can be viewed on the Internet or not, what rescues them from loneliness and from pure voyeurism is the creation of a device, an area of reverberation, allowing a political-aesthetical action. The blackout of these images is what the establishment expects from the violent event. Black Air is also an attitude against this blackout.

“Images are everywhere”, says one of post-modernism’s most widespread clichés. But Black Air is the proof that it’s not so simple. Some images are just condemned to total amnesia (by media, by authorities, or even by population itself). Some will never be displayed. With this astonishing installation, Apichatpong and his co-workers are forcing us to reflect on our place as viewers/receivers – and on spectatorship in a wider sense. Whether it’s a political meaning, a set of spatial sensations, or a link between art and social engagement, the fact is that everything must pass through experience, through the actual places of perception. With its constellation of buttons, Black Air says that it’s up to you if you’ll listen or not, if you’ll see or not; it’s a necessary action/choice in the wireless era, when images, sounds, signs, forms seem to be floating on air. How to deal with them? And with censorship? What to do with the unlimited powers of images and with their accumulation, zapping, editing, viral-like transmission?

Luiz Carlos Oliveira Jr.