Jasper Rigole is Belgian media artist with a background in film. After he successfully finished his studies at the film department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, his interests shifted away from being behind the camera himself and now he solely creates videos and installations with found footage. When Rigole explained this during the artist talk we had, it almost felt to me as if he created a strong aversion for shooting fiction films. Of course it is normal that an artist’s inRigoleterests shift during his artistic career, but the way Rigole spoke about his approach to film making, was unlike anything I heard before from other film graduates. His bio (http://bamart.be/en/artists/detail/907) states the following: “By using an encyclopedic approach and a quasi-scientific precision […] he further investigates concepts such as authenticity and objectivity”, and this is not only visible in the works he produces, but in his whole attitude as a (video) artist.
The found footage he uses in his projects are 8mm films found on flea markets, which he digitized and ordered in a classification system. Rigole states that these 8mm have no real value, except for the memories they contain for very specific people. The memories on these 8mm films are mostly happy ones, and in his work Paradise Recollected, he combines these happy videos with a story that tells about the search for a utopian paradise. By adding a corporate voiceover, the images presented become very alienating and even the feeling of memory is subtracted from them. The fact that the footage Rigole collects in it’s original form (e.g. 8mm home videos) only has a meaning to a very limited set of people is interesting for our own project. But where as Rigole extracts the videos from their original context and makes them available to everybody, we try to do the opposite; limiting access to create an archive that reflects somebody's likes and interests.
Paradise Recollected is just one of the many works Rigole created from his collection of found 8mm film. He bundles this work in the project The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories (IICADOM). Using the same kind of footage for different projects could become boring and repetitive, but Rigole tries to experiment with different visual languages in his projects. This results in innovative ideas that explore a broad range of questions about the found 8mm film.
The website of the IICADOM also functions as an open archiving system for all the digitalized 8mm footage. Making the footage available for remixing is most certainly a nice idea, but the archive, as Rigole presented it during the talk felt very premature to me. Throughout its projects, IICADOM explores the use of corporate language and elements. This is very visible on the website and I think this is an interesting artistic experiment. However, the whole idea of transforming the tagging of archive content into some sort of game where you could gain achievements felt a bit rash. It felt more or less like something Interaction Design students would create for a school assignment, rather then something that would fit in a refined project liked the IICADOM.
The website of the IICADOM also functions as an open archiving system for all the digitalized 8mm footage. Making the footage available for remixing is most certainly a nice idea, but the archive, as Rigole presented it during the talk felt very premature to me. Throughout its projects, IICADOM explores the use of corporate language and elements. This is very visible on the website and I think this is an interesting artistic experiment. However, the whole idea of transforming the tagging of archive content into some sort of game where you could gain achievements felt a bit rash. It felt more or less like something Interaction Design students would create for a school assignment, rather then something that would fit in a refined project liked the IICADOM.
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