The Pixelated Revolution

Abstract

How should we understand the mobile phone images uploaded to the internet during the ongoing Syrian Revolution? Are the broken-up and incomplete images taken by Syrians an extension of their physical experiences? Are mobile phones extensions of photographers' brains, of their bodies, of their beings?

Dance as Documentary: Conflictual Images in the Choreographic Mirror (On Archive by Arkadi Zaides)

“…The first videos screened during the performance are an extreme example of such an aesthetic; there, the legibility of the image seems to be in inverse proportion to the physical involvement of the operator, and the low visual quality appears as a guarantee of authenticity and an evidence of urgency. In The Pixelated Revolution (2012), a performance-lecture devoted to the amateur videos filmed during the first Syrian demonstrations against Assad in 2011, the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué draws a provocative parallel between the formal properties of that kind of footage and the aesthetic manifesto issued by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg under the label of “Dogma 95,” as if the avant-garde desire to escape all the usual artifice of the movie industry could share something with the urgency of recording and testifying in the middle of a confrontation (see Mroué 2012, 26) 13 . In fact, both situations share at least one thing: a set of formal properties characterizing the images they produce.…”

“…In all these clips, the frontality of the image becomes that of a distant confrontation, a reciprocal and violent, yet asymmetrical, encounter: camera against shouting and verbal abuse, camera against mirrors, camera against stones. Mroué's lecture, in the section entitled “Double shooting,” offers a radical, tragic, and (in the philosophical sense) sublime amplification of this lethal relationship: a camera against a rifle, a camera aiming at a gunman who himself is aiming at the camera operator—and pulls the trigger (see Mroué 2012, 29). Although far from such an extreme situation, the videos screened during Zaides's performance give us access to an implicit typology of filmic antagonism.…”

Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing

“…POV via wearable cameras (Cartwright and Rice, 2016), sousveillance (Mann, 2004) and mobile phone videos (Mroué et al, 2012) have been harnessed by contemporary visual and performance artists to discover what is to be watched and seen by a machine (Levin, 2008), while Mann (2004) reverses the hierarchical and authoritarian gaze of surveillance by engaging in sousveillance, referring to 'citizens photographing police, shoppers photographing shopkeepers, and taxicab passengers photographing cab drivers' (Mann, 2004: 1; see also Brucato, 2016). POV as a technique in gaming applications seeks to replicate human perception (Rascaroli, 1997), places the audience behind the eyes of a fictional character or avatar and immerses them in the simulated moment.…”

Affect Image, Touch Image

“…Lebanese performance artist Rabih Mroué has worked extensively on videos of the early stages of the Syrian uprising in his performance and exhibition The Pixilated Revolution (Mroué 2012). In this work, Mroué seems to hint that the images smuggled out of Syria still point to some sort of indexical relationship.…”