Context

URBAN SPACE

To begin with, there is the search for a space. A strong and interesting context is needed in order to gather and then to sow our media. A priori, each space, whether full or empty, harbours the potential to let the imagination soar. But what matters finally is its capacity to fascinate, to be the meeting ground for contradictory forces, to create situations which take us out of the everyday in order to frame it better, in short: the most fertile ground for this project definitely appears to be the urban space with its entangled rhythms which elude us…
It is then up to the filmmaker to choose a path from the many possibilities which pass before his/her eyes; to stick with it, to persist, understanding nothing at all about it, to keep working at it in order to capture finally in flight the moment which will later be shared, revisited and be part of a new context: the digital space.
The issue is, in a way, to be able to find a renewed and highly subjective relation to the urban space by sampling or watching well-defined fragments, forgetting the rest, just setting off into the perspective offered, the “here and now”.
Faced with complexity, to choose the simple gesture.

CINEMA

To start with, we watch the last stage of the process: the ideal film we would like to reach as a movie-loving visitor. There are models, examples, which make your heart beat faster – but how can we get what is the fruit of the lengthy toil of one or two brains, focused on their individual preoccupations, to work just by performing a physical activity (in this instance, walking) ? The challenge faced by this project is to situate the cinema not at the level of the molecule (the film), but at the level of the atom (the media: our “building brick”). This means adding a little of the cinema to each fragment collected, hoping that it will be as eloquent as a scene from the era of silent films…
Then comes the indexing, which will make our atom-media “vibrate” so that, later and further on, it connects with another atom-media which responds to its oscillation.
And finally, the surprise (the deception, the enchantment); the magnetization of our media into a film, at the end of the process, will revive the images, the memory of the trajectory. We edit as we walk…

NEW MEDIA

Not just at the start or at the end of the process, but really during and all around; it could be said that the new media are in this case the meeting ground between the urban space and the cinema.
This term no doubt leads to confusion and its use in this context requires some explanation.
The “Walking-the-Edit” project does not stress the newness of a medium (computing consumes any novelty even before it appears), but more the fact that a medium can be renewed without changing its identity, simply by changing its position (in a context) or its place (in time). In other words, it is a question of exploiting the variability of a medium (here, as much the content as the container). This is not new in itself, but the scale and the intensity of the variability has evolved considerably, raising the question of linking the variations (by digital means) with the world as we know it.
The cinema in a time of “media renewal ” still sometimes sounds off-key or not in rhythm – it is up to us to invent new instruments, or systems, with which even the alleged false notes can ring true.

The image, at the end of the day, which could result from the use of the system, is that the labyrinth is not in front but behind us: out trace, along with so many others.

To lose oneself…