About the disconcerting case of the Projector-House1

David Ayala Alfonso Translated by David Ayala Alfonso

Declaration of the experiential and non-experiential properties of the ProjectorHouse. Attraction-repulsion instigated on history by the current times. Precariousness of the drawing when there is no visible evidence of its transformation in time. Impotence to reveal its transcendental value through the pathetic and stinking surface. Impossibility to inform by itself, on the moment on which the animation reaches its quasi-symmetrical state. Psychic and mnemonic impact. Intentioned historical remark and unintentional historiographical remark. Disparate archive created by pouring action and the phenomenon of surface oxidation. Physical state of the material. Mountain of rust topped by rat and pigeon feces. Symbolic and transcendental value. Under the great mountain of rusty metal and shit, something has been discovered. Fragments of memories that create unexpected drives and cyclical nightmares of national life. Involuntary patrimonialisation of the contents of a house with an uncertain legal status, forgotten and expected to collapse. Passive exercise of de-patrimonialisation. Dialectics between public policy and pirate preservation. Fictional offices of nostalgia, anachronistic and unnecessary. Sexualized animism of the film meandering from one projector to the other. Self-digestion, coprophagia and redundancy between the cover and the content. The doubtfulness of one projector when initiating the exchange. Naivety in the reproduction of carnal mechanization. Doubt and then self-generation and explosion of form and meaning. Filth. Disgust. Curiosity Imbued passion.
For mor information on the project on which the image has being drawn, please refer to http://carlosguzman.cero29.org/archives/1276
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1. Description of the initial surprise encounter. Four years later, and in a totally alien space, without any trace of its symbolic presence, the image of the Projector-House manifests itself. This image, which is merely a model or a mental or linguistic image, economic in shape but potent and complex, could have appeared by the action of an old and fetid smell that might have triggered a certain impulse to the brain, one similar to what could have been experienced when entering that house, which would become the live reference of the Projector-House. In the animation from which this image has been extracted, a house feeds another house with film tape, after they built themselves and mutually regurgitate, as the heads of Jan Svankmajer, but remaining disturbingly intact. Carlos Guzmans Projector-House is a dialectical device that inquires itself, reflects on itself, while it feeds and pours into history. It is a continuous film tape that comes from a now going towards a then that the optics of the Projector-House render outwards, while continuing towards a new (or simultaneous) projection on its chronotropic reflection. The conceptual model of a project becomes a powerful form in itself, in order to review the hypothetical autopoietic nature of history (or media history, or the history of power) that transpires through the quasi-symmetric drawing of the Projector-House. The admiration and interest that I felt for this project was inconsequent with the lateness of the analysis, as well as with the absence of resources to examine it, on the space-time on which my curiosity is renewed. While reviewing this drawing, I come across something new, despite knowing very well the material and having stabilized its image for quite some time in a past that now becomes more and more remote. There seems to be something on me of that psychic state described by Hume on the insistence over the referent, where the difference is produced on the transformation of the experience itself and not on the object, to which one goes back again and again, remaining unchanged, still, but revealing new aspects on every new occasion. I try to diagnose the drive that the Projector-House produces me, attempting to extract a rather more transcendental sense, thus conferring it a relevant place on the motivations of my analysis. The anxiety of discovery (production) of meaning propitiates the sporadic encounter with lights coming out of the buildings, describing monumental projectors in the periphery of vision. Gibsons semiotic ghosts, or the spectral projections of monstrous technologies of vision force me to complete the task by any means possible. Ridiculous but compelling intellectual inquest for meaning, in order to insert this fragment in the set of transcendental ideas of the memory field, revealing some of the fixations suffered by the psyche during the process. 2. Description of the phenomena produced as a result of simplifying both text and image. After the initial encounter, the image of the Projector-House has become a phenomenon in itself, unpacked to bring closer attention to its constituent parts. The

aforementioned permanence and anxiety allow the production of discrete images parting from the return of the constituting parts of the syntactic (and visual) unit of the Projector-House. First secondary manifestation of permanence: I dedicate several hours to Googles image search engine, looking for coincidences that can draw me near the projector in my mind, which I recall to be part of the discovery of the fetid heritage, some years ago. The search of the projector then, as well as my current mental quest, visit complex mechanics, naked or hidden, softened or rounded, projectors visited now with a mind of the past, but designed then by minds from the future, who created this dystopia that eventually evaporated, somewhere between the wars and the collapse of economies. Then, the future designed by science fiction is postponed indefinitely (some of its parts cancelled) to make room for clumsy, complex, utilitarian, economic and unfinished shapes. The endless collection of models of 16-millimeter projectors constitute a steep horizon of anxieties, desires, futures, disenchantments and resignation over the heavy pace of time. Time that, just as the sea shaping the rocks, will cyclically break, reduce and round the shapes of the new projectors to the whim and possibilities of their age.

The volume and robustness of the projection machines drive me away from the initial drawing, but as an obsessive set they take me back to the essential idea of its configuration, and then I am back again in my mind at the Projector-House, now constituted as an image that is also an idea and several other ideas of those multiple (every) images of all the 16-mm projectors of history and all the Projector-Houses that now exist only in the futuristic anomaly on which they unwittingly take part. I cut across the projector, the image of the romanticized projector and the one spitted into the world by the limitations of its time and the need for its existence. In my mind, I try to superimpose the shapes, arms, buttons, lenses, reels, levers and blinds with

those of the projector in my memory, the one that was part of the universe of the Projector-House. This absurd fixation on a detail that seemed minor (the physical projector) points me towards the kind of pleasure emerged through the observation (remembrance) of each one of the details, seeking to escape from the miasma that took the Projector-House back to my memory. Second secondary manifestation of permanence. Back in the anomalous market of the real estate of the Projector-House, I review the multiple variations of the matter, trying to elucidate some kind of result to inscribe a reasonable cause into this now inevitable enterprise. I wander through the shelves of the image bank of the Internet, looking for clues to decipher the crosslinking between the notions of the house and the projector. Or the Projector-House. The digital grid of images tells an unlikely story of shapes that are impossible to decode on a linear account. Perhaps the anxiety for the unfulfilled future, fed for too much a long time these fantasies, encouraging temporary orgies of design and shape, followed by waves of regret and desires for a return to the essential. The lens, primordial component of the projector, does not reveal virility in its shape (which is diluted in the complexity and solidity of the whole electronic paraphernalia) but in its potentiality. Depending on the kind of projector, images can be augmented as many times as to overwhelm the size of the house that hosts the projector. The images can take over the house to the extent of becoming an essential component of it, transforming the space in an excessive but necessary receptacle for the constitution of the Projector-House. Or it could become a house-projector, a habitable projector, potentially to big or too small, depending on the direction it is read. The 16-mm projector, virile and mindful (observant), can shelter an entire family with great comfort, without loosing its primary function. Multiple semantic variations go along with the experience of images.

1. In the moment of the encounter with the advertising image that takes me back to the time of the projector as a technology, I meet again with the ProjectorHouse. Family, usually gathered around TV, finds in the 16-mm projector a pretext to bring over the experience of the outside to the inside. Cinema, as space and experience is thinned within the notion of cinema as spectacle. The house is projected towards the exterior through the projection apparatus. I must admit that at this point, I had forgotten that the whole origin of the drawing that caused this matter. A key on its origin would be: filmic heritage forgotten on a house held in abeyance accidentally found and recovered by an artist. At the house, rotten and fetid, the artist is the only one that has not yet dismissed the value of a mountain of 16-mm film cans and has undertaken the task of recovering them, little by little, without experience or special equipment. The rest of the world has no awareness of the existence of this material, or believes it has no importance, or it is beyond salvation. 2. As a curiosity, I find a model to build a projector at home. Although I go through the whole website, I do not stop at the text, rather I try to make sense of the diagrams that show the shapes, objects and dimensions required to undertake this manual project. I imagine the materials, deciding that wood will confer the project a certain dignity as a craft. I conclude that at some point the wood will burn and take the components to the limit, precipitating the inevitable end of the projector. And then I think of the Projector-House, part of a fictional institution created inside a house that is falling apart. Its collapse is uncertain, but at the same time inevitable. The wood could not take any test for resistance. These ideas contain new keys about the project on which the Projector-House emerges. The artists that finds the material decides to undertake the task of digitalize it slow and quietly, to avoid raising suspicion from the institution that owns the house (and therefore the material), which has not yet discovered the (cultural, heritage) value of what is hidden (buried) under their practices of real estate speculation: leave the architectural heritage to rot to raise a new multi-functional building. To make memory (even more, history) endure speculation, I build a device for projecting it.

3. At some point I find (or decide to settle for) a projector like the one that was part of the original project, the heart of the Projector-House. I must say that, technologically, it is quite pathetic: heavy, ridiculously designed, and belonging to a period unable to be determined. But what interests us is not precisely the appearance of the projector, especially if we are looking for an obsolete equipment to recover some material. We are in the quest for an acceptable technology of vision rather than an acceptable vision of technology. The projector fulfills its mission. It is used to put the 16-mm films on a flat surface and, under proper conditions they can be captured and transferred to a digital format. It is a precarious but efficient procedure. With the proper ritual, memory will be safe. The artists creates logs, writes reflections, classifies videos, produces subtitles and discovers his time projected on those materials from fifty years ago. He decides to create a fictional institution to promote them, to set them on movement as historical objects and as audiovisual materials. The Roman loci of memory. A place to wander through the past by inhabiting it. Water leaks into the building, it is crumbling; the artist rehabilitates it for his own purposes. 4. On eBay, there is a small collection of 16-mm projectors for sale: a strange collection of technological oddities that overwhelms any grid of images available at Google or similar engines. Amongst them, a briefcase appears, looking heavy, perhaps wooden and from which we can only recognize the brand of the projector it shelters. The container takes me back to the idea of the Projector-House. What is the logic of the container in this whole matter?

I tend to think of history in relation to a phobia that I inherited from my mother. Being allergic to many insect stings, I have seen her for years exalted over the most insignificant appearances of flies, nocturnal butterflies and

roaches. At some point, I could make a sense of its absurdness, although I have not been able to cope with the fear and repulsion many insects still produce in me. This phobia is learnt and inherited, but no it has been internalized by my psyche. History can be (or not) about fear and repulsion; but it is certainly about learnt psychic states, or to say it differently, despite the awareness that history is actually a certain narrative (or the correlation of many), we cannot avoid the overwhelming power it has over our own assessments of the past and our construction of the future. Then I arrive again at the Projector-House, understanding the connection between container and contained, inside and outside, projection and reality. The resulting material combines images of the past with audios from the present, performs cuts, superimposes translations, but always allowing the material to transpire its essential to the present. In part, the act of avoiding the excessive deformation is affective, and in part it shows how history is reflected on itself. The film tape goes from one machine to the other and is reproduces as it would be part of the same machine, in synchrony, in collaboration. It is a mutualism between today and yesterday, between the house and the projector, the inside and the outside. The present is produced as a projection of the past, and what changes is perhaps our experience.