The Webwork reviewed below can be found at Eastern Connecticut State University at: http://www.easternct.edu/personal/faculty/chibeaue/Start_Web_Presentation_Here.html

Originally published at http://www.rtvf.nwu.edu/people/chibeau.

In The Desert reviewed by Annette Barbier
Journal Of Film and Video 49.1-2
(Spring-Summer 1997)

In The Desert: A Webwork, directed by Edmond Chibeau; 1995; digital movie, 1 min. 3.5 Mb; Web Site, 5 pp.

In The Desert: A Webwork is a hybrid media piece that includes a digital movie and several pages of graphically arranged words and images at an Internet address. What makes this work unique and an engaging example of what is possible on the Web is the relationship of the still images and the text to the moving image.

In The Desert (the movie) is, like so much of Chibeau’s work, a collage of material from various media. In it, he uses storyboards not only as the score but also as visual components. He includes these static materials, as well as a poetic explanation of the text, along with the movie itself on the Web site. These elements help us decode the movie’s text components (which would otherwise be illegible because of its reduced size).

Being able to consider these elements not only as background material but also as significant parts of the work redefines our traditional role as audience members. We are, in a sense, forced to become co-creators, piecing together phrases and motifs from the still images and text documents when watching the movie, recalling and inserting them when necessary to fill out an understanding of a movie that, in the quarter-size Quick Time movie format, doesn’t stand on its own. The unfortunate loss of quality caused by the downsizing and compression artifacts makes the subtlety of the images present in the original video version very hard to see on a computer monitor.

Rather than making a longer tape from which only a portion could be excerpted for the Web site, Chibeau chose to use a very short form in constructing his piece. The length and size of the movie portion of the site make it particularly appropriate for the Web, since the home viewer can reasonably download it (although, even on a 14,400-bps modem, it can take 20 minutes).

These size/length considerations raise some interesting issues. A major invention in the development of film-the Latham loop-brought us the possibility of longer films and allowed for the development of today's primary movie format, the feature-length motion picture. Ironically, in the 1990s, speed and bandwidth limitations have forced moviemakers interested in using the Web in precisely the opposite direction.

Chibeau here turns what might otherwise be a hindrance-the need for brevity-into an asset. The haiku-like quality of his work-its sense of being pruned to the minimum and tightly packed-foreshadows the development of a style singularly suited to display on the Web, the digital movie. Brevity does not necessarily insure clarity or depth, however. Alvin Toffler describes ours as a "blip culture," in which sound bytes that have maximum impact but minimum complexity are the preferred mode of communication. Chibeau’s work, in contrast, closely resembles traditional high-quality artwork in that it yields more meaning upon closer inspection.

The digital movie progresses as follows: The opening image, a text/painting on paper that served as a source for the piece, is pierced by an eye in the upper-left-hand corner. The video key threshold changes, revealing another eye, and the text "she leaves" crawls across the screen. The image breaks up, using a digital video effect to reveal a man (Edmond)-in high contrast-keyed over another source document, and the whole is keyed over a moving background whose source may be a speeding train or a video signal rolling horizontally. Another phrase, "truth lover," crawls left and seems to be followed by Chibeau’s gaze. As "an eremite in a photoelectric cell" rolls from behind the "storyboard," the man turns to open his mouth, thereby reframing the storyboard element as a thought or dialogue bubble, and both elements dissolve out, leaving the moving background and the word "solo" on the screen before the final fade.

In his own breakout of the text, Chibeau identifies the "she" of "she leaves" as the Anima, the source of creativity in Carl Jung’s system of thought. As his source of inspiration for his past work turns to dust and leaves him alone, a hermit in the desert, the relationship between self (possibly the spiritual or creative self as identified by the eremite/hermit) and technology (the photoelectric cell) is questioned. This is a central issue in any discussion of a new medium-whether the new technology, whatever it is (photo, film, video, computers, and now the Web), can in fact be a valid means of artistic expression. Video, an older technology, makes possible not only the side-by-side juxtaposition of images but also their layering, and in this piece those layers have a variety of changing relationships to one another.

The initial image of the text/painting becomes a screen pierced by holes and reveals a deeper layer (a woman’s face). They both disintegrate to reveal a limbo black deeper background, in "front" of which is part of a drawn and typed image. Both black and image provide a background for the human figure, who then acknowledges the presence of other elements, including text rolls on the top-most layer and on the hand-drawn storyboard, whose meaning and importance are changed by the position and expression of the human figure.

These are all very interesting manipulations of video space, which typically is seen and interpreted either as flat and one-dimensional or as an illusionistic space attempting to represent real three-dimensional depth. Chibeau plays these levels against one another to create a conceptually sophisticated and complex piece in which the elements have surprising and changing interrelationships. The past-here seen as plans and storyboards-not only forms a simple blueprint for the present but also informs it. The creator is present to reinvestigate and interconnect his own work.

Chibeau’s roots in Cageian and Duchampian use of chance and multiple meanings open his taut phraseology to many interpretations. Is he a lover of truth, or in truth a lover (perhaps of she who left him)? Does "solo," which holds none of the negative connotations of "alone," suggest his view of the artist as essentially still an individual’s job, despite the potential for interconnectedness and collaboration that the Web offers?

In conclusion, Edmond Chibeau makes good use of the Internet’s potential to deliver a variety of forms and constructs a format that forces us to investigate and piece together information to arrive at a conclusion. He raises numerous theoretical and aesthetic issues in an extremely compact and poetic way, creating an oasis in the vast wasteland of triviality that occupies much of the Internet. Go Back