Fire Gazing

HD loop, 01:30, 2016

 

Fire Gazing is a looping video work exploring the loose boundary between simulation and reality, as well as the ancient communal act of gazing into the flames, spinning yarns around the strange shape the flames take on. The work originates with a misreading: one Christmas my aunt, watching from across a busy downtown street, mistook a  fireplace screen-saver for a real fire in an empty office building, prompting her to summon the fire brigade. Her error was not discovered until they had axed their way in through the window. It was a moment where digital illusion prompted tangible action.

The video loop circles around these moments of confusion, using them to reflect on how representations can leak into reality and shape our perception of it. Disembodied voices from across times and cultures gather around a digital campfire, describing what they see in the flickering flames: a Venus figurine, a drone, a USB cable, a plastic garden chair. Their words are drawn from instruction manuals, Wikipedia entries, and fictional stories, forming a polyphonic game of interpretation.

In Fire Gazing, the campfire becomes a site of collective projection and mythology. It suggests that language may not have emerged primarily to communicate, but to conjure, to give form to the unseen. As the flicker of fire becomes the flicker of screens, the video asks what we hope to find when we stare into them.

 

Direction, Animation, Sound

Rustan Söderling