man sea

man | sea






‘man sea’ is an attempt to explore possibilities that narrative might provide to an art piece. In recent projects I was looking for a solution how to make strong though subtle links between autobiographical and universal subjects, form and content, explicit narration and concept.

This final piece is a result of various attempts to give narrative a visual form: I tried projecting superimposed images that illustrate a narrated story, edited a very straight-forward story, even tried destructing any possible narrative by encoding and decoding images into text. Nothing seemed to clearly express the initial idea –question of viewers’ perception and interpretation of a presented narrative. Using images I would be imposing my own visuals and blocking the process of creativity that is happening (presumably) in viewers’ minds, so I decided to split film into three extremely straightforward parts: my sea, the sea, your sea.
The title ‘man sea’ allows freedom of interpretation, when any word may be inserted instead of ‘’. In the first part, my lyrical observations and memories about the sea are read. A non-Lithuanian audience is able to read only English subtitles, which are incomplete and extremely simplified; questions of authenticity and accuracy might be raised here. However, the visual aspect is perhaps of more interest. As the viewer is placed in front of a blank screen, with subtitles as within a film, the intention is that non-existing imagery be sought immediately. As a result, the viewer is forced to invent absent images to support text and monotonic audio information.
The Second part, on the contrary, provides consistent imagery and variety of information. A close-up of ‘sea’ is synched with superimposed sound: different tracks of people talking about the sea or ocean. Different languages and overheard phrases give different associations, making the video only a background for the occurring thoughts. Nothing personal (except in the selection of audio and video) is implied, which makes ‘the sea’ part more universal.
Third part: ‘your sea’ has an aesthetic and ideological link with the first ‘my sea’. Flickering images are presented like a kaleidoscope of common understanding of ‘sea’ or ocean. A blank screen, accompanied by the sound of waves, follows this sequence of silent, still images. The viewer is left all by himself, as no information is given; now both imagery and narrative depend directly on him. This part allows the viewer to ponder on something very intimate, anonymous, indescribable, though present (as happens in solitude, by the sea).
Though the work is in video format, it has very close ties to literature. Voiceover includes excerpts from Alessandro Baricco’s: “Oceano Mare”, Ernest Hemingway’s: “Old man and the Sea”, my own written piece, and a short poem written by Usman especially for this occasion. The type font is Bookman Old Style, which is an obvious visual link to books and texts. While working with this project I looked at works by Tacita Dean and her exploration of imagery and texts, and combination of both in her drawings. Watching structural films made its imprint as well. To mention Michael Snow and his film So Is This, which is built purely on text, however, does not have a narrative. I find my work a little relative to Doug Fishbourne’s slide-shows, as it has a voice over, manipulation on viewer’s perception and reaction, flicker. I consider this work conceptual, as all devices were used to explore the idea of text and image perception, and further interpretation of it.




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