The project consists of an automated digital film and multi-channel installation in which a predictive algorithm choreographs re-appropriated weather stations that move, gaze and speculate on the imminent shift towards the heated (warming) superposition of time and weather. The starting point of this work is the time-image of cinema in relation to the in/determinacy of weather by speculating of a shift in time. Open-access cameras gazing at the becoming of skies, seas, glaciers, forests, deserts, rivers to perform a choreography in more-than-human time. Within the installation, an algorithm attempts to predict the weather shift to a dreamlike time in superposition (where past, present and future meet).
Beyond the movie camera as an apparatus, we live in times of decentralized machines of capture. Following on the string left open by “La Région Centrale” (Michael Snow, 1970), the work proceeds by emancipating from the notion of the “center” and reappropriating the “idea of periphery from an anti-colonial viewpoint (...) toward an entangled vision of the world as it unfolds” (Michela Coletta, 2023). “The future is ancestral”, reminds us Ailton Krenak with a call towards the rescue of indigenous cosmovisions that escape linear time. What could such visions be like within technocultures in the midst of a climate crisis and global surveillance? How could such apparatus be reappropriated to perform a renewed gaze of Earth through a locally bound, more-than-human perspective?
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In Dialogue: Artist Talk with gnration:
gnration: Can you guide us through the work you're doing at gnration? From what we’ve seen, the dual meaning of the word “tempo” seems to motivate a lot of what you're doing.
Luiz Zanotello:There is an overlap of meanings in the Portuguese word “tempo”. “Tempo”, in Portuguese, means time – the cosmological, chronological time, the time when things pass – but it also means weather, the climate, measured by the passage of clouds, the sun and how we feel the environment.
The background to the work is, in fact, the perception of a time that is not a single universal time. It is a time that is ambivalent. A time that, like the word “tempo” in Portuguese, can have several meanings at the same time. I really like to use the word to describe what I'm trying to communicate with this work or what I'm trying to access with this work, which is a universe of different temporalities at the same time. It's a way of composing, understanding or measuring time, which is not a single time that passes in the same way everywhere in the world. But it is a time that is constructed in local ways, from different perspectives.
gnration: How can you communicate those different temporalities in your piece?
Luiz Zanotello: I have been creating imagens from open-access cameras, installed in several places around the world to monitor the weather. These cameras are usually places in such a way they don’t catch the passage of people or institutions; they are creating a view of the sky or the landscape and the passage of time. I've been fascinated by these images for a long time. For some reason, watching very distant places creates an image of distance, which somehow has a relationship with time.
I’m creating an archive with those images, streaming images from cameras we call CCTV. These are images that are being lost and never seen, and my central idea was to create an algorithm, a way of chaining these images, and translate them into an experience. I've already developed the algorithms that receive these images from streams all over the world and begin to create their own language for interpreting these images. Now I'm at the stage of developing the installation itself, in which I've defined the way these images are presented, their spatial dimension, their sound, aesthetic and material dimension. Basically, I’m transitioning from the virtual and digital part of the work into the more analogue and material one.
gnration: How has your stay in Portugal and your collaboration with Ricardo Vieira been?
Luiz Zanotello: I’m Brazilian, my mother tongue is Portuguese. I feel, I write, I dream, and I create everything in Portuguese, and spending this month here, as someone who has lived in Germany for ten years, was very special for me. I got to be in touch with my mother tongue and I was able to exchange with Ricardo, who is an artist from Porto. We communicate in Portuguese, and that was very important for the creative process, you’re exchanging within your native language. Ricardo and I, we got along very well in our thinking and creative processes. I arrived with a proposal and a backdrop. At first, he came in as someone who has a practice linked to sound, but he's also a media artist, just as much as I am. As the process went on, we discovered sound is not intrinsic to this work and Ricardo's role ended up also becoming more like a holistic collaboration in the creative process, as someone with whom I could exchange thoughts and processes. For me, it was a very important mechanism to have someone I could exchange with along the way.