Perhaps we have not fully internalized it yet: we are witnessing a revolution of epochal magnitude. And not since yesterday. First cinema, now immersive technologies, have engaged directly with the processes of imagination – processes that, despite declared intentions, have never been mere entertainment. They are co-agents of human imagination. The entire body of work by Craig Quintero – artist and director of theater, performance, and immersive video, in Competition with the mixed-reality experience Blur (co-directed with Phoebe Greenberg) –, is among the most refined expressions of this shift. It preserves the most radical tenets of performance art – ritual and performance as immersive experiences ante litteram – while merging them with the latest technological possibilities, tracing a clear path not only for his own aesthetic research but also for the most meaningful forms of technologically mediated imagination. These are not visions that obliterate the human in the name of some futuristic artificiality, but rather those that integrate technical artifice into the humanly experienceable, within an aesthetically coherent representation – amplifying it.
In Blur, the result is as technically astounding as it is artistically decisive. The very theme, cloning, touches on the deeper issue of transcending human limits and the psychological motif of the double. Immersed in a labyrinth that is at first concrete – entirely contiguous with the environments we are accustomed to inhabiting in the work of the Taipei-based American director, and perfectly coinciding with the virtual space we find ourselves in once the headsets are worn – we move by walking through corridors, riding elevators, and crossing increasingly abstract passages, until we come face-to-face with our own double, as if in the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This succession of labyrinths and “Quintero-like” boxes would be enough to convey the full sense of a work that is formally grand and conceptually ambitious – though perhaps a little compressed in its central part by the subplot of the disappearance and subsequent (imagined, yet so realistic!) cloning of a child. The narrative dimension was not strictly necessary, though it does serve as a semantic anchor for the spectator, who might otherwise risk getting lost in the maze. And yet, from Quintero and Greenberg’s techno-poetic labyrinth one does emerge – shaken and transformed, but whole again, restored to oneself and to one’s human uniqueness.
BLUR
by Craig Quintero e Phoebe Greenberg (Canada, Taipei, Greece, 50’)
IN COMPETITION
