Velocity Particles

Rivka Rinn, Tel Aviv 1992

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The old hierarchy of means, techniques and materials for the making art collapsed with the rise of notions about the dematerialisation of art, notions which gathered especial force towards the late sixties, as a late ripening of the Duchampian ideology. I prefer to deal with the materiality of art. A pencil-line on paper is not more noble or more sensitive (a priori) than a documentation of the insides of a computer. I see no hierarchial difference between the works I once did with oil or collages, or earlier in performance art, and those I do now with the computerised scanner.

I´m not a photographer. I use a camera. This should suffice to explain that the photography I am exhibiting now also does not deal with the question of photography, but with the phenomenon of our non-awareness of things we see. More precisely: with the question of our con-sciousness or unconsciousness of reality.

My interest in capturing "velocity particles" stems from the technology or genealogy of photography, but from the fact that speed is one of the most dominant characteristics of our time.

The pioneers of photography, like Etienne-Jules Marey, developed new and revolutionary means for understanding and documenting the phenomenon of velocity. Marey, at the end of the nineteenth century, developed the cinematographic rifle, based on the automatic rifle, which itself had been developed from the idea of a steam-boat paddle-wheel. In contrast, the supply of photographic technology today is so extensive that I require no special sophistication or expertise to photograph bodies mowing at high speeds.

It is possible that the moving image in mass communications (television) and works of art (cinema, video) constitutes a mental background for my interest in the concept of velocity. Very clearly I can find in the writings of the contemporary philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio the most precise expression of these notions.

The point I photograph from corresponds to the point of view of someone who watches the mo-ving picture on the cinema screen. My interest is in the motion of the picture rather than in the narrative content of the movie.

I photograph from a train, a car, a plane - while the sights flash by rapidly in front of me - as in front of someone watching a movie. But unlike the person watching a movie, I´m in a static postion within a space that is moving rapidly, and the objects or landscapes receive their imaginary acceleration because of my motion past them. This creates a set of "acceleration" and of "the static".

The outcome is that facts which are not registered by the camera lens and imprinted on the film. From this point on, my intervention consists of selecting and determining the technical means: from developing the image on emulsive cloth to transferring it onto the canvas by means of paint sprayed by the computerised jet printer. All this, so as to see what we do not know and not see. Hence, I´m not interested in forms, but in conciousness of what does exist, in the aesthetics of velocity and in the new architecture of the land-scapes of velocity.

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