 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
webwork 3
QRIME,
by Motomichi NAKAMURA (USA), 2002
WHAT IS IT?
Vision 1 :::
A cartoon gallows where snake-tongued guests taunt noose-suspended titted & testicled critters being executed as they orate in classic computer-generated voices latin-excerpts from the letters of Abélard and Héloïse: "Solus ad victimae..."
Vision 2 :::
A haunting miserable labyrinth of clanking monochrome pistons inhabited by pairs of little red stick men who sodomize, decapitate, stomp on and strangle each other. More?
Vision 3 :::
"As You go Along You will see there is no Happiness…." And you will also see, a big moon-faced flying demi-god who hovers among stoic robotic assembly-line pedestrians who commute on suspended walkways. The moon-faced flying demi-god uses its polished black fingernails to sadistically flick poor oblivious commuters into the void, until with a gleaming kitschy flourish you will find "…Only Joy"
Vision 4 :::
Seppeku : japanese ritual suicide done in vector graphics with a simple aphoristic mystic-lube side-sauce. Overall impression: either ludicrous or tragic, probably both.
Vision 5 :::
A sea of unrequited lovers hurrying to drink poison and join corpses already fallen to the floor, laughed over by a buddha-eyed beloved who lives in the wall and listens to soft swing music as it provides a perfect macabre homeopathic to deaf and dead broken hearts.
Vision 6 :::
Entwined twins, yin-yang strands. Paradox vortexes where analog-digital machine-blood spurts out-in soft-hard pixel-squirts. A continued pondering of love: the twin of hate.
Vision 7 :::
We witness someone climbing out a window and another trying desperately repetitively to escape the clutches of an unseen assailant. Hi-rise voyeurism or sublimation of our self-destructive soul, it's just another day in Qrime.
Vision 8 :::
A spattering of canned applause accompanies the demon who grins and spits out cherries into boxes full of blood.
CONTEMPLATIVE PAUSE :::
And scattered amongst this craziness, a quotation from Wole Soyinka's Bachhae of Euripides seems incongruous yet appropriate. What is a Nigerian Nobel-winning playwright who re-wrote a bloody Greek drama doing in an anime-influenced pomo-horror net-art work? Well, it is simply a symptom of Qrime's bizarre breadth, it's flesh pitted with profound metaphysical source material.
The constricted fetish zone of Motomichi Nakamura's preoccupations eclipses any petty mundaneness. Here is an extended obsessive glimpse into the wretched heart of murderous-suicidal humanity: blind petty deterministically-defined vignettes that follow the terrible path of worst result.
Qrime is edited by Pillar Larrae. In the site notes: "The Qrime series express our particular view of the role of violence in the society and its manifold relationship to human nature....we have contemplated the words of those authors whose work, we think, has contributed to the insight into questions of violence as manifested in primitive legends and myths....By depicting each them from an aggressively digital visual style our goal is to relate the contemporary viewer to the inalterability of his own humanness"
Drowning in the grid of violence which we project outside ourselves, the dark cataclysmic realm of Mitomichi is unfortunately only too evocative of daily headlines in our carnage era, the endless superfluous bloody stream that has gushed since the birth of consciousness sewed genitals onto reptilean cortexes and set them loose in this world of metamorphic hallucinatory turbulence.
THE FUTURE NOW
A recent music video of Nakamura's is being featured at Sundance 2004: laptops & Martinis (Punto Zero) can be seen at www.motomichi.com/anim_punto.html# or check out Add Boiling Water for more visions of sardonic sweating alienation, grotesque body-inversions and amputational freefalls.
[*****************]
Vision 2::: (continued)
Touching the sodomists evokes a blast of electricity, a riptide pixel-zoom and a blunt rectangle of text that reminded me of Mishima & Jean Genet: raw sexuality as nexus for philosophical rumination, transcendent & fatalist, illuminated by a morbid sensual nihilism. Turns out it was from Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil), 1928. A fact that is transmitted at the next mouse click with a blast like a car alarm.
Up in strangulation zone, the polished nostalgia of the Beatle's Yesterday undergoes a macabre post-modernist wrenching. Is this the apex of our attachment to each other that culminates in murderous domestic rages to avenge the beauty we once tasted?
Visiting the stompers is a bit like getting your finger stuck on an atari console: hammering screech of diodes and blat of gears clanging. Touch the next down arrow and we are confronted by a quotation from Nigel Davis, Human Sacrifice: in history and today, "Both sacrificer and victim know the act is required to save the people from calamity and the cosmos from collapse."
The decapitator has its own motto, the tiny pixel red stick figure holding up the dripping pixelated head: "Because the victim is sacred it is criminal to kill him, but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed." (Hubert and Mauss).
The decapitated is a letter left by a kamikaze pilot for his parents. Which includes the memorable phrase:"...may our deaths be as clean and clear as the shattering of crystal." The human capacity for fanatical resignation and analytical purity is a complex issue, and with Motomichi as guide, the only thing that is getting clearer is human capacity for cruelty. 
David 'jhave' Johnston
top
 back
|
|
|
|
|
|
