About:
Untitled (a.k.a. Marta) was developed in relationship to Untitled (a.k.a. Leonard) and both were meant to interact with each other through the syncopated clicking and clanking sounds emitting from their speakers. Marta makes use of a partly skinned DVD player and TV. The DVD player is mounted just above the TV. The viewer can simultaneously view the DVD disc, which is spinning in the DVD player, as well and its projected image onto a TV screen below.
Also, important to note that the DVD’s surface has been marked with coloured markers creating a spiral-like design, which can be seen both on the DVD and its own TV image.
Thoughts on Untitled (a.k.a. Marta)
Again, there is an initial assumption on the viewer’s part that what they are witnessing is a live event and that the image of the spinning DVD is being generated from a live camera feed.
However, with Marta a paradox is created for the viewer in that the viewer/participant eventually realizes that what they are viewing is a pre-recorded video of the DVD spinning, but even this realization still makes it difficult to stop believing that a live event is in process.
Dan Graham in his book Video-Architecture-Television also elaborates on this phenomenon explaining that:
“Video is a present-time medium. Its image can be simultaneous with its perception by/of its audience (it can be an image of its audience perceiving). The space/time it presents is continuous, unbroken and congruent to that of the real time, which is the shared time of its perceivers (p. 62).
Further Related Reading & Articles:
Philip Auslander Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. PDF
Untitled (a.k.a. Marta), John Naccarato, The Obscure Objects of Desire and the Rise of the Technological Chimera, video excerpt, AXENEO7, Gatineau, QC, Canada, 2010
Below are links to the individual Hybrid Sculptural Objects and their related texts (published as part of my MFA Thesis, The Obscure Objects of Desire and the Rise of the Technological Chimera: Towards Death and the Other ), 2010. Specific segments have been revised and updated for each post. John Naccarato, 2022