SHOT

VIDEO PERFORMANCE SHOT

An interrogation of the incessant battering of the media.
SHOT questions the society of images and the new relationship to the world which it effects. Using headlines without photos, Patrick Bouvet ‘shows’ the images which criss-crossed the last century and shaped the collective unconscience. He collects, deciphers, manipulates images drawn form television, the media, the arts, images imprinted in our brain which, by their sheer impact, have influenced our imagination and structured a large part of our personnality, to the point of risking the loss of our identity.

In SHOT Patrick Bouvet uses the language of the media to reveal what it conceals within itself. He reveals the dangers of an ultra-mediatized society : formatization, contamination, manipulation...


The body, last bastion of resistance.
The still matter, which is the image (but also the collective memory) constitutes the visual thread of SHOT : a collection of all the acts, mythical or merely significant, belonging to the 2nd half of the 20th century, as depicted by media images.

The author records the violence of a world inhabited by ill-treated bodies, burnt to cinders, of collisions and terrorrist attacks. The death of Kennedy, photos Before/After a breast implant, the crash of a 747 Boeing, Hiroshima etc.

The central issue : the body. Omnipresent, this crash-body, object-body, performance body is perhaps ‘the last bastion, the last remaining physical reality of a certain type of freedom’, says the author.


A style of writing inspired by the culture of mixing.
Inspired by sampling and serial music, Patrick Bouvet samples sentences, terms and then combine them and loops the words and phrases into new combinations.

He superimposes images by mixing the words which define them, until the original image is pulverized and becomes invisible. From these new combinations – from this ‘invisible’- is created another meaning, another (fictitious) image. By means of this mental technique, he invites the reader to enter the unconscious memory that the images provide to free himself from media chaos, to perceive their deep and human motivations.

A trip into the unconscious
With SHOT, Patrick Bouvet gives us a glimpse of the many meanings of manipulation. In the first place because SHOT denounces – by the irony of its structures, the media manipulation which we are surrounded by. Also because Bouvet manipulates his reader by the narrative process he employs. His way of working on words produces a hypnotic effect. It crosses the borders between conscious and unconscious, and situates the way we understand his text deep within us.

‘A never ending explosion of the two hemispheres of our brain’.

This journey in the reader’s memory is the great strength of Shot. It enables us to explore our most violent fears about an excessively mediatized society : the loss of identity, the tyranny of the images, one’s implicit collaboration with this system etc.

The stage project concerning SHOT rises out of this inner voyage. Music, scenography, video, actors, all seek to take the audience travelling in memory (images) by stimulating the senses –hearing and sight- and not to propose a realistic illustration of the text.

The material body
The performance of the two actors (a man and a woman) is based on the visual qualities of Patrick Bouvets text. The two voices seek to express the unconscious structure of the narrative, to make heard the echo contained within the legend accompanying photos both real & fictitious. The actors are not the incarnation of one individual voice, but the representation of the collective body (man, woman) at the heart of the text. The body on stage will be used as material :’... trapped body, crashed body, failed body, performance body, Hiroshima body.’

Subliminal images.
Each fragment of SHOT – each legend accompanying a manipulated photo- constitutes a micro-narrative produced by the world’s media machine whose images the reader never sees. The power of the images is seen in the apparent poverty in which they are incarnate.
The systematic projection of realistic images on the stage threatens the imaginary voyage. These visual elements aim at stimulating the viewer’s memory : images projected onto, or taken from television act as subliminal signals acting below or above a certain threshhold of the unconscious and  allow a different reading for each person who sees them.

Electroacoustic music
 If sight is one of the first senses to be analysed by our consciousness, sound can more easily be illustrative without being consciously perceived.
Music, in a electro minimalist vein suggests the probable sound and the atmosphere of the narrative legends. The musician’s intervention on the rythm of the actors mouvements and the images is direct, underlying the structure of the narrative and pin-pointing the themes of the body contained in the text. The music ranges from the intimate, to the mediatized, and the level runs from whisper to bomb. It places the viewer in an acoustic world of intimacy and inner adventures.