PANDEMONIUM
Authors: Vinitsky Yonatan 
Published: October 2020

PANDEMONIUM / Yonatan Vinitsky

bq. 03min. 23sec. / B/W + Colour / Sound [Stereo], English Narration

bq. Completed: 12/2003 / UK / Distribution: Heure Exquise!

The video PANDEMONIUM (2003) opens with the following voice over:

The landscape of body / The texture of skin / The movements that were frozen / Unfolding changes / Permanent recollection of yourself / Exhale / And inhale / Exhale and inhale / Exhale and inhale.

This text stakes out the arenas where the film operates – the permanent and the frozen, textures and landscapes, changes and recollection, and body and skin.

PANDEMONIUM considers these issues in senses both visual and technical, and through the script and text. From a technical point of view, PANDEMONIUM is a film ‘without’ a camera, a ‘scan-film’ where the scanner substitutes for the camera. Constructed from 40 images of a man’s face in various positions and close-ups, and from sheets of coloured sticky dots, the images were scanned by placing the face or the stickers directly on the scanner plate. Captured scans were transferred to Photoshop where they were cropped and edited. These still images were edited together digitally, the video edited frame by frame to produce movement and rhythms. The speed of the images is erratic and a slow, monotone soundtrack and narration provide a rhythm for the piece sometimes at odds with the vision.

Using a scanner (a domestic scanner) to piece together a video, a moving image, the function and the definition of the scanner itself is questioned. In the video the imagery and the text are being used as key elements to examine various possibilities of scanning technology. The term scan usually implies the exploring of something quickly (as an action), but at the same time this allows us to analyze and explore the result in extreme depth and over a matter of time. Hence, a contradiction arises between the action of scanning and its purpose. This contradiction is one of the key elements of PANDEMONIUM; using the scanned images as single frames, allowing the result to turn into footage, and for other ‘scans’ to appear using various rhythms and speeds. PANDEMONIUM functions as a beam of light, transmitting an illumination into the space, allowing the spectator a reflection on what they are being subliminally exposed to, rather than ‘seeing’. At the same time it is important to mention the reading of PANDEMONIUM as a film that encourages scanning as a mode of watching, through presenting the information quickly by showing glimpses of images in sequences of one-frame – the experience of watching can change every screening depending on the spectator’s awareness and patience. (In this sense it is interesting to mention that the Internet version of the film, due to its compression, actually loses some frames every second. This means that images are missing in the patterns and rhythms that originally were constructed, and leads to a new version being conceived.)

The act of scanning turns the object into a digital file. The scanning actually ‘digitises’ the person’s face and allows it to become part of the video vocabulary. In that sense the scanner (through the act of scanning) authorises the object in becoming an image.

The difference between a scanner and a video camera is in the method of capturing an image. While a video camera records the image on a digital tape, printing the image that is taken by its lens vision, the scanner works systematically, scans the image in parts, from one side to another, in a fixed time (depending on the object and settings). Another difference is the direct contact between the object and the screen (scanner plate). These facts allow a different kind of freedom and creativity while in the making; they can offer a real time change and the opportunity to create an effect of change and metamorphosis in the act of capturing. In addition, the scanning allows blowing up an image and examining it closely. In PANDEMONIUM, a portrait of a man’s face is being created by breaking its image into bits and pieces, each time blowing up a different part of the face, allowing a new face to be conceived.

PANDEMONIUM also explores the relation of the scanner and the body. The term scan is also used in medical terminology as a method of exploring different parts of the body in medical inner-body scans. In PANDEMONIUM, there is an attempt of exploring the body and face as a landscape and texture but at the same time as something very exposed and personal – turning the exterior into interior, and the images into memory and recollection, disconnecting them from their original meaning and connecting them with association and remembrance:

Do you remember youth? / Reflection of body parts in your imagination / All was real / The voice. The look. The touch. / It was warm.

PANDEMONIUM explores the uses to which domestic scanners can be put, challenging the range of things that can be captured as well as their mode of capture. Placing the face on the scanner challenges both our engagement with a scanner – usually it is being used for previously captured documents and the variety of things that can be scanned.

Scanning is always related with perception, and PANDEMONIUM explores this relationship. The film finishes with this text:

Stop looking at me like that. / Shifting yourself all the time from A to B / From B to C and back again / A B C / One two three / One two three / One two three.

To whom is this text directed – the scanner itself that scans systematically and moves from A to B, to the different images, or maybe to the character in the images? Possibly to all three at the same time, and to no one.

PANDEMONIUM is built on contradictions that create a state of confusion and inferno, a place of warm and cold and the feeling of a ‘private’ PANDEMONIUM.

Citation reference for this article

MLA Style

Vinitsky, Yonatan. "PANDEMONIUM." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/04-vinitsky.php>.
APA Style

Vinitsky, Y. (Aug. 2005) "PANDEMONIUM," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/04-vinitsky.php>.