Haptic Cinema Experiments Paola Valenti, 2005 Versione originale italiana

Scott Hayes´ intervention in Studio44 Gallery is the result of a connection of encounters: the encounter of a cosmopolitan artist – formed between Sydney, Paris and Vienna – with the city of the Genova and the peculiar urbanistic tissue of its historic centre; there, the encounter with the singular exhibition space, a true tunnel, obtained from the coverage, centuries ago, of a „vicolo“ (lane) : an environment dense of history and perceptive stimuli that, exactly because of these features, was for the artist a starting point for conducting a reflection on the encounter between past and present, between memory and contingency. These thoughts, beyond being a fundamental reading key of Hayes´ work, have determined the methodology and the operational choices of his Genova intervention: Hayes has elaborated a basic concept for his installation out of the impressions of his first Genova stay, but has decided to subordinate the passage of the project stage to the operational stage in the moment in which, back in Genova to put up the show, he would have seen again the gallery and would have again walked in the maze of lanes and harbour streets: only then, by finding or not re-finding certain sensations, could he verify their authenticity and their real meaning. The psychic and sensorial relationship between the artist and the place, the re-actualization of past impressions, have therefore become conceptual knots of the operation; an operation that – progressively – has delineated an encounter between the concepts of space and perception.
Hayes has used various devices – the scarceness or the total absence of light, the curtain in order to open or divide the space, the objects quickly spread in the obscurity, the flux of the images of various videos - in order to keep the environment mutating and unstable, and to involve the spectators in an experience close to the „haptic cinema“ as theorized by Laura Marks. In her writings, Marks highlights the concept of haptic perception, that is the union of tactile and cinesthetic functions that make it possible for us to experience physically the objects surrounding us. By applying these theories to the field of cinema, Marks distinguishes between a purely optical and a haptic visuality, by which the eyes act like tactile organs: where an optic vision suggests a distance between the observer and the image and thus forces the spectator to „work by imagination“, the haptic cinema aims to create a sensorial relationship between the spectator and the image. Thus, the target of a tactile gaze, is not an „object“; more the idea is of a dynamic of subjectivity between the observer and the observed.In order to create his tactile cinema, Scott Hayes has involved the visitors of the gallery in two different „experiments“: in the first ( live cinema 1) he proposed a vj-set in which the fast ongoing of various videos prevented an involvement in the narration and would induce the public to search for other levels of fruition; furthermore he has preferred the disturbed and husk images of the video, to the clear cinematographic ones: the video images, exactly because of their inferior quality, would return in an approximative way that what the human vision picks in detail, and would activate a different visual perception. In the second experiment (live cinema 2), Hayes has immersed the public into what he himself defined a sensation-thought, by which the visitors would be able to perceive, in the almost total darkness, the presence of objects, without nevertheless ever being able to understand their real nature nor their definitive location. The primary intent of the artist was, as a matter of fact, not to decodify the object-space relationship in terms of sculpture or environment, but to stimulate a sensorial and imaginative perception as an alternative path to knowledge.
	The video, Unknownsomewhere, realized specifically for the show; has represented for Hayes an occasion to explore the haptic cinema, by examining the processes of knowledge, of the relationship of space-perception, and of imagination: in the haptic cinema the concepts of size, proportion, proximity, distance, limit and horizon interlace and subvert each other, thus creating new parameters for a different kind of seeing. Not by chance Hayes constructs his video around images of the sea, that nomadic sea that Gilles Deleuze opposes to the sedentary spaces and that he defines as a smooth space. Smooth spaces are the sea, the desert, the countryside; the city is a striate space; the countryside civilized by agriculture, and the sea as scenario of navigation, are examples of how the smooth space could become striate. In the striate space the lines and the paths are subordinated to points: you go from one point to the other, it is the space of the geographic maps. In the smooth space, on the contrary, points emerge because a line passes through them: it is the path that counts. In the smooth space, the line is a vector that constantly changes its direction, like Foucault`s fool, or the nomad who´s trajectory incessantly follows and chases a local vegetation, temporary, itself on the move. (De Fiore). Thus the smooth space implies a different modality of use, not supported by conventions, but uniquely depending on the sensorial experience of the single individual, like the places and the images of Scott Hayes´ haptic cinema. unknownsomewhere movie