Temps mort / Idle times – dinner scene

Temps mort / Idle times is an experimental film relating the story of a family embroiled in an age-old family drama. The story is spread across a wide range of distinct works, each depicting a scene and each attempting to engage the viewer with interactive elements. Spectators are encouraged to form bonds between these disparate facets. The project explores the mechanics that drive the medium of film, and in its realization the artist has raised the question: How does one create a narrative, or a character? What role does editing play in this process? How does one move an audience to enter into the illusion? How could interaction extend an illusion?

By using the contemporary technology of interaction through the use of video and telephones, and while using genres of European classical painting such as group portraits and still life, this work gives the added dimension of time to the Romantic theme of death. It is an ambitious work allegorically suggesting that, with the appearance of recordings through various media such as video, time today does not advance in a linear way. With the greater occurrence of works that defamiliarize phenomena in the present age by referring to the history of art, I have expectations for the sort of developments VERHAEST will show us in the future. (SATOW Morihiro)