Autobiography 03-05
The work is an autobiography that is more of a diary. Things that happen daily are collected and presented as short stories or chapters of a daily diary, but the scenes are not there and no one but the narrator (the artist) knows them. He is the one who observes, watches, and analyzes. The events, the relationship between the sequence of numbers, and the incidents the narrator has been through are all mysterious, but these number sequences are what the work is all about. It is a documentary of the details of a stage of my life between 2003 and the end of 2005. The numbers represent my daily activities and that is why the work looks like an intentional registration of events, places, times, characters or actions. The chains of long numbers are thus detailed reports that depend on piling up daily events and repeating them until the audience transition ally gets an organized picture. The numbers are based on a group of archived events I collected from bank papers where I shaped the facts and expressed them leaving out places and things so that the elements of numbers symbolized time and the human dimension. Hence the work maintains a personal trait in its manner of narration that portrays a different general impression in a semi-documentary real and credible attempt.
The second part of the work is a film depicting events emphasizing the fact that the work is more than a chain of numbers. The video is more than the simple act of documenting an event; it dives into the very essence of the work by painting a series of scenes, some superfluous in their degree of detail, others omitted and most a mixture of reality and fantasy. Some scenes have a rational base to them in that they analyze the relationship between the numbers and their counterpart in real life. The mode of presentation is quite unusual: the video is played on an ATM machine, thus stripping it of its functional quality and transforming it into a movie screen. When the viewer is faced with the ATM, he sees a group of event and memories that are actually mine, while experiencing the same sound effects (road and ATM sounds) he would while carrying out any normal ATM operation.
The work has a social and human dimension as well as a sarcastic one, daring to transform someone's life into a series of numbers and dates. As the viewers get involved in the work, they are transformed from a social-human state into a commercial-numerical state concerned with financial matters. They are then faced with a work that rebels against their everyday life, against their financial reports, their greed and materialistic tendencies. The abstract symbolism of numbers does that; it is abrasive in its documentation of something so personal and pushes one to contemplate its language.
The second part of the work is a film depicting events emphasizing the fact that the work is more than a chain of numbers. The video is more than the simple act of documenting an event; it dives into the very essence of the work by painting a series of scenes, some superfluous in their degree of detail, others omitted and most a mixture of reality and fantasy. Some scenes have a rational base to them in that they analyze the relationship between the numbers and their counterpart in real life. The mode of presentation is quite unusual: the video is played on an ATM machine, thus stripping it of its functional quality and transforming it into a movie screen. When the viewer is faced with the ATM, he sees a group of event and memories that are actually mine, while experiencing the same sound effects (road and ATM sounds) he would while carrying out any normal ATM operation.
The work has a social and human dimension as well as a sarcastic one, daring to transform someone's life into a series of numbers and dates. As the viewers get involved in the work, they are transformed from a social-human state into a commercial-numerical state concerned with financial matters. They are then faced with a work that rebels against their everyday life, against their financial reports, their greed and materialistic tendencies. The abstract symbolism of numbers does that; it is abrasive in its documentation of something so personal and pushes one to contemplate its language.
