windows | Kika Nicolela

title. windows

date. 2011

description. program of curated videos

running time. 60 min

thanks. Videoformes Digital Arts

There is a similarity between the formation of our ego, which according to Lacan happens during what he calls the “mirror phase”, and the identification process that takes place as the audience looks at the movie screen. Although the spectator is always located in the place of the film camera, the cinema apparatus is omitted, since the classical cinema is always in service of verisimilitude. The only element that can give everything away is the frame, the screen, the window that contains the image. It limits the identification of the viewer with what it’s being seen; thus the recurrent attempts to place the spectator “inside” the movie, “wrapping” the image around him – 3D, 4D, Imax, virtual reality, expanded reality... But what makes the classical cinema so appealing is the fascination over the act of looking itself and the fetishist objectification of the image. Movies such as Rear Window, Peeping Tom and Blow Up have very successfully dealt this this subject. Interestingly, we can notice that the window is also a recurrent element present in many artists’ films. In this program, the selected works approach this theme in various ways: the window to gaze into or to gaze from it; the window framing a certain reality; the window through one looks into an imagined world; or the window itself used as a metaphor. The artists come from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, UK and US. Three of them – Anders Weberg, Niclas Hallberg and Nung- Hsin Hu - have made new videos specially for this program.