Inverted affects (2006)

Year: 2006

Description: The work Inverted Affects starts from a series of videos made by young and teenagers with the cameras of their mobiles. All the videos, most of them anonymous, are freely available on the net and have been gathered by Laura Bey straight from some of the most famous and visited videoblogs. The videos 'borrowed

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The work Inverted Affects starts from a series of videos made by young and teenagers with the cameras of their mobiles. All the videos, most of them anonymous, are freely available on the net and have been gathered by Laura Bey straight from some of the most famous and visited videoblogs. The videos "borrowed" here bear witness to scenes of young violence, fights and many diverse clashes. However, in many of them, it is easy to detect that these violent scenes have been feigned and recorded; these performances of street violence have been made by the youths themselves as some kind of game or entertainment to be then enjoyed and shared through the videos of its entry. Even in those where violence is not pretended, it becomes obvious how, at least, the awareness that the situation is being recorded determines to a great extent the tension of the event. Through this strategy of appropriation and re-representation, Bey stresses the intensity of the relation between technology, entertainment and violence in the youth world, and, more directly, in the more and more widespread identification of violence with enjoyment. The only interventions the author makes on these videos are fundamentally their inversion; she turns them over, mentioning, in a more or less ironic way, some of the well known practices of image reversal that have taken place in the course of the recent history of the contemporary art, as the ones performed by Georg Baselitz on his paintings or by Joseph Kosuth in his series Cathexis, in the early 80s. This work was included in the e-show “Link-a" curated by Juan Martín Prada and produced by MediaLabMadrid (Madrid, Spain)and was awarded with the third prize of Biennal IbizaGraphic 2006 (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Ibiza).

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