The 4th Floor:le quatrième étage is a bi-lingual Internet work and is the first part of a larger project entitled The Search for rue Simon-Crubellier. The work explores real and imagined relations to place and poses the question: is it possible to bring something that does not exist into existence by searching for it?

In this fictive work a resident of the Cité Internationale in Paris, whose studio is on the 4th floor, has composed a video blog. It is a sort of archive of ‘found’ video left in the Studio by two unidentified video makers. Apparently the video makers were looking for a street in Paris, which figured in a book by Georges Perec, called Life A User’s Manual. The street is rue Simon-Crubellier.

The found video presents itself as an enigma or puzzle. It is not that the scenes are unfamiliar, but that the video is out of context. So in an attempt to understand the found video the resident of the 4th floor begins to organise the material into different categories. Firstly, the material is divided into different categories of position. The viewer’s position, the video makers’ position, the subject of the video’s position. In this way one can ‘search’ through the logs by menus of position - Near, Far, Above, Below. Normally these are words signifying how bodies orient themselves in a place, but in the case of The 4th Floor’s ‘found’ video, it is never clear who is near, or far, and from whose point of view?

The second way the material is organised is spatially. There are three variations of each video segment - multiple frames, a micro moment, and still frame. In this way the video becomes spatial rather than temporal as frames are placed side by side rather than seeing them through time. It becomes an exercise in reading, this time a spatial reading. Reading a video, reading a place, reading a log.