Cinétique by Boris Labbé

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WORDS Gabija Purlytė

 

Boris Labbé is a young French artist whose animations have already brought home a number of prizes. The title of his 2011 work Cinétique, meaning “kinetic”, exposes two of the starting points from which the video sprang – a concern with mechanical movement and with cinematic principles, whose close relationship is probably not as often noticed by English speakers. The animation is built on the principle of a zoetrope – a device which produces the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures, which traditionally takes the form of a spinning cylinder with slits cut vertically in its sides and a cartoon strip inside. The artist seems to pick up on the Greek meaning of this term as well, which can be loosely interpreted as “wheel of life”: the white, ghostly form we see floating in indeterminate black space –interstellar, psychic, or both – appears at once organic and geometric, reminiscent of a skeleton torso. Our viewpoint – “the camera” – moves inside and about the structure as it begins to rotate, accelerating until, the artist tells us, it reaches its vibration speed. That is where the magic happens and the moving image encoded in the zoetrope comes to life, revealed by strobe light, before gradually slowing down again. The form the video takes is also palindromic, which means it could be “read” both forwards and backwards, implying a perpetual cycle.

The shapes succeeding each other betray their figural origins – a hand flashes, a forest of hands, a whole human figure… While they are sometimes evident, at other points the abstract and bodily forms merge into one another in an almost hallucinatory manner, making us question whether the biological elements are just a product of our minds’ “paranoiac knowledge” which Salvador Dalí was so keen on exposing. The geometrical forms also take on the semblance of skeletal elements – vertebrae, pelvic bones – and together with Quentin Buffier’s eerie soundtrack, this places us in the realm of medical microscope technology, bionics, and sci-fi, merging with the supernatural by way of the audiovisual imagery borrowed from the horror genre. As the rotation of the zoetrope reaches its highest speed, the motion becomes pulsating, “emitting” the sound of a heartbeat heard through an echo-scope or, even more precisely, of the rushing of blood through the heart chambers. The electric sounds, then, become those of the electric impulses running through neurons…

Labbé takes the legacy of pre-cinema optical games, which have the loop as their fundamental physical principle, and expands their potential through the capacities of twenty-first century 3D computer modelling. In the process, the hypnotic visual and audial experiences he creates become an exploration of much more universal and archetypal concerns – the cyclical relationship of life and death, the equation of motion with life and of stasis with death, and the elusive boundary between the inanimate and the living.

For more of Boris Labbé’s work, please visit his website http://www.borislabbe.com  

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