2012. XBOX KInect zbuffer, video. 13 min.

Documentary about the mediological features of human existence. As W. B. Yeats said about this transformation : world is not unreal but an invisible world – is not a dream anymore…

According to Debray transfer is transfer through generations. We transfer in order to leave what we know ,what we live for and what we believe in after us…

Communication means the transmission of the information in space, within the same space. Time continuum, and the transfer means transmission in time between the different space

The film is going to be made from the following elements:

-recorded documentary interviews (it will be just a sound, so I can record them anywhere)

-shooting the video at the locations

– recording the characters on the Kinect device

Using 3D data received by Kinect will remove such kind of communication crutch away from the image. At the same time anthropomorphism, psychologism and emotionality of the character will stay.

Review by Gazira Babeli, Second Life artist:

“The choice is not that of adopting the most sophisticated technology,

but of working in a sophisticated way on the technology…”

Massimo Ferronato, The VX scene – 2001

Who is the actor? Where is the scene?

by Gazira Babeli

I never had the chance to talk with Mikhail Maximov about his work “Mother Give Birth To Husband Father”. I totally ignore his cultural background, his goals, his artistic ideology. Therefore my personal comments below are strictly based on what I see on my VLC Player, live now.

The poetic approach to medium and technology (Kinect, After Effect, I suppose) is based on a subtractive synthesis approach.

Mikhail uses the Kinect to remove the actors’ identity from the scene, transforming the necessary human presence in a sort of final grey matter. For a complementary effect, all the framed scene become humanized by that grey matter.

We are used to perceive actors through their expressions, their way to perceive the scene and the events that unfold on the scene. We tend to perceive what the actors perceive.

Of course, my first impression of Mikhail’ grey mattered actors was alienating, I had concentrate for a few minutes to synchronize my perception with that liquid scene. It works.

It works like classic Theatre. Ancient Greeks used to alienate their faces with masks, the walk with stilts, the voices with megaphones…

Yes, the voices… The text, the script.

Here something ‘magic’ happens and, honestly, it’s really hard for me not to think of some of last century’s approaches like the “the writing of scene” [scrittura di scena] by Carmelo Bene and/or “The Theatre of Cruelty” by Antonin Artaud. Some of my cultural limits.

The grey matter “super-actor” has a multilayered voice. Here, the subtractive synthesis applied to the visual makes the senses explode in many directions.

The real-time spoken dialogue gets mixed with the voices of long-term memory (LTM) and with the classical chorus narration.

The VLC Player is empty now, the scene happens in our brains, in our memories.

Mikhail Maximov uses the video and modern technologies to re-think the theatre form in a very different way. What more could I say?

Respect!