[-empyre-] in memoriam Thierry Kuntzel

[Sean Cubitt <scubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

there is the awful leaden weight of death over the thought of  
Heidegger. what is so depressing about it is the absurdity which he  
gives it: the meaninglessness. I don't mean that deatth is  
intrinsically meaningful, but that it has many meanings, for specific  
dyings. And each is embedded in a locale, in a world, among the  
living and the dying, for whom it means immensely

Thierry Kuntzel's Nostos is currently showing at ACMI in the  
Beaubourg touring video retrospective. It is a lovely thing, the  
inhabitance of a room with light, recorded in greyscale, on a bank of  
(memory supplying details) nine monitors in a 3x3 grid  (might be  
4x4). They are heritage boxes, and the light trap is excellent, so  
you are alert to the fading of light, the flare in the camera - which  
would have been a tube camera, liable to comet tails and saturation -  
and the sluggish decay of the phosphors in the old tubes, longer and  
slower than the modern ones, and longer and slower than the simple  
line scan overwriting a flare of brightness. Because the light trap  
is so good you're aware of the blaze of light - you are basically in  
night-vision mode, all rods, few cones, straining after the photons,  
but when they burst your rods flare out and carry the afterimage.

These beautiful artefacts (as engineers will call them - unexpected  
or unwanted products of the technology) are integral to the devices  
it is shown on (I recall seeing a single channel version years ago at  
the Institut Francais in London, in a dimmed but ambient-lit room,  
very differently - i recall a blue tone to the image there, but that  
might be a trick of memory). These screens will eventually lose the  
capacity to show the work, and it will be reconstructed, in a new  
form on new screens. With luck it will be around for years to come,  
transferred to new storage media. Perhaps the archivists will try to  
register some of these artefacts - tone the screens with an ambient  
grey to denote, or point towards, the off-black quality of video  
black back in the day.

The archive of digital materials points us always to the fundamental  
ephemerality of this seeing, this version, this event, this mounting  
and staging, this moment of viewing which is so tragically tied to  
time, but which makes its statement against panic by offering, as the  
obverse of tragedy, the utterly now.

Kuntzel's Nostos is its own tribute to the way electronic media more  
perhaps than any other except performance -- which Nostos records in  
the actions of the woman in the room we see passing light over the  
walls -- , or the media of everyday interactions, kisses, kindnesses  
- the way electronic media can, if they wish, announce their own  
fading as integral to their experience.

In this way Nostos teaches us not to mourn, or to mourn in the  
knowledge that life is for the living, but dying is for the living too.