“Lavoro Macchinine” by Alexis Grey Hildreth
Title:
- Lavoro Macchinine
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Filmmaker, Video Artist, or Animator(s):
Collaborators:
Symposium:
- ISEA2022: 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art
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Artist Statement:
Lavoro Macchinine is a collaboration between Alexis Grey Hildreth (moving image) and Ora Cogan (sound) that deconstructs the opening credits and reimagines the musical overture in the title sequence from the Italian period drama Il Gattopardo (1963).
Lavoro Macchinine occults the film’s original static text with a mercurial, kinetic typography, built from the very glyphs it is at pains to obfuscate. Through gestation, approximation, replication, and assimilation; Lavoro Macchinine discovers its own alien properties of form and behaviour, while simultaneously exploring the boundaries of its cinematic environment.
The living word produced by Lavoro Macchinine is propelled and propagated by a hunger for and the digestion of, Il Gatopardo‘s diegetic space. It longs to hide within it; to become part of it. The building blocks of language are hijacked: letterforms bifurcate in an imitation of manor gates, logographs elongate into fragile towers, conveyor belts composed of graphemes disseminate across the laneway, ligatures roll out of ideograms to scrutinize Roman busts, alien marginalia breach the balustrade, cedilla scrupulously scale the villa walls, extraterrestrial dingbats lodge themselves into the ruins of a world that no longer exists, ogonek laden emissaries probe the cinemascape in order to become it; to become us.
