film-performans 16 mm
1976
Presented as a two-channel projection, the work belongs to the series of biological-mechanical recordings where the camera is considered an extension of the filmmaker’s body. The performance was carried out in Łódź in the vicinity of its film school. Robakowski walked holding two cameras, one in each hand, waving his arms around, relying completely on the cameras’ uncontrolled recording of his own expression. Connected with the body and detached from the eye, the cameras became the means of recording the creator’s psychophysical states. A year later, Robakowski formulated a theory of such recordings as combining the mechanical medium of the camera with the biological medium of the body and, above all, being ‘fully beyond the control of the eye’. Images unmediated by ocular vision and the habits of visual perception revealed, he wrote, ‘more than I know, see, and feel’.* Footage recorded by the cameras, moved and directed by the actions of the body, enable the viewer to sympathise with the artist’s emotions, biological energy and physical limitations. Robakowski continued to explore the experience of biological-mechanical recordings in works such as Along the Line… (1976), Dance with the Trees (1985), and Ouch, My Foot Hurts . . . (1990).
* Józef Robakowski, Zapisy mechaniczno-biologiczne, 1971, reprinted in Józef Robakowski. Vital-Video, exh. cat. Poznań: National Museum in Poznań, 1993, p. 34.
