A Man Who Knew Too little

‘A Man Who Knew Too little’
a performative-lecture by Arnaud Moinet, a mixed media performance that includes a video projection, a screen sculpture and a few props. (27 MIN. LONG)

As a performer, I propose to react ‘live’ to a selection of pre-selected footage that is appearing beside me on screen, its sources vary between scenes of classic movies and excerpts of amateur’s found footage. The performance questions the manipulative power of these images and their editing.

If you’ve got nothing to do, Do it on stage!
Jack Smith

The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures, directed by R.W.Paul, 1901

The project borrows its form from the staging of the 1901 British comedy The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures in which a country yokel visits the cinema and confuses film and reality; he as an entertainer reacts on stage to what is appearing beside him on screen. As a performer I propose to react ‘live’ to a selection of pre-selected footage but unlike in the British comedy, the images projected in this performance aren’t particularly spectacular and don’t necessarily impress the audience for their realism. Sources of these images vary from Classic movies to Youtube videos and question in different forms and approaches our relation to moving pictures, our memory, our desires.
The editing of images being eclectic and non linear relates directly to the way one can drift in front of TV while shifting between channels or while surfing on the net and it allows the performer to constantly propose some potential scenarios and to act as a counterpoint. Bearing in mind that the performer here is proposing alternative scenarios by including himself in a self-reflective fiction; the performer questions what performance means to him in relation with cinema, with art, with TV, and what it could become considering the overflow of fast-paced images in which we are constantly immersed.
The performance itself is constructed as a sequential series of little sketches or scenes which don’t follow a linear narrative, but rather deconstruct the performance itself as much as the experience of it.

shot from the performance at Platform00000010

The attempt here is to question the conventions of art, in particular authorship and ownership, the object status of a work and its permanence, as well as the idea of amateurism and the reconsideration of the medium video after the ‘youtube’ effect.
This performance however re-uses in its structure the ingredients for a good Hollywood movie recipe : A fall, some screams, a love scene, some crying scenes, some singing (even the bad ones), some mimicry, some dancing and of course some credits in order to acknowledge my sources.
The formal devices employed are easily named: repetition, framing, alteration of syntax, all visibly manipulating that medium which is known to be highly manipulative itself.


for more info go to:
http://www.platformnortheast.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QULBrXiEt04