Minnette
Vári
Aurora Australis
Television, after radio, is accessed daily by millions in South Africa who
rely on this medium for their daily fix of cheep entertainment (soaps, especially),
to follow their favourite sport and to see what the newest developments are
in international and local politics and other affairs. Television has come to
be called a ‘tool of true democracy, spreading information and education
to all’. Although there are certainly arguments against this, it does stand
that a great many people access their share of entertainment, world news and
education from the small screen, even if it is from the classroom or the house
of a neighbour.
As in many other countries in the world, exclusive television entertainment
has become big business in South Africa, and sets itself quite a long way apart
from the state-monitored National broadcaster. In this spirit there are a few
‘pay channels’ that make their material available only to subscribers
who have the appropriate decoders. As is the international custom, these exclusive
services scramble their broadcasts so as to render their programmes unwatchable
by the non-paying public.
At times I can sit and watch these scrambled signals for hours, marvelling at
the strange combinations of recognisable image and sheer visual ‘noise’,
all the while noticing that the soundtrack is not at all part of the programme
being broadcast, since they rotate the same lame 1980’s songs over and
over again. Intermittent break-ups in the audio signal bring storms of electronic
hiss and crackle, or long stretches of silence followed by the voice of an unaccountably
excited host announcing upcoming attractions that will remain just ‘noise’
to me and millions of other South Africans, until I can afford my decoder, that
is. Despite this, there are moments where I think I recognise the flash of mangled
footage as coming from a movie that I’ve seen before, or footage of some
other event that I know of, and this keeps me riveted to the screen for more
clues. Invariably I come away seeing flashes of light when I close my blood-shot
eyes.
The TV is like a hearth that gathers families and strangers alike around its
flashing bluish glow; it emits rays of light-borne information to countless
pairs of eyes – information that illuminates or confuses, encourages understanding
and tolerance or incites violence and hatred. Or simply moves people to buy
stuff they will never use. All things and all energies can be seen as information
in transit, and here I thought of the sun that emits a constant shower of solar
wind-driven sub-atomic particles out into space, causing chemical and electrical
reactions to occur - sometimes on a grand scale.
The solar wind flows over and around the planet, hitting the Earth's magnetic
field at around 400 kilometres per second. The field deflects the stream towards
the magnetic poles, where the electric charge of the particles reacts with the
chemistry of the upper atmosphere. The resulting photo-electrical discharge
lights up the night sky and creates the famous Aurora Australis of the South
Polar Region, exactly as happens in the North Polar Region’s Aurora Borealis.
Great flowing ribbons of coloured light brightens the skies over the polar region
too far south to be seen from the southernmost part of my country. And yet,
because of its location I feel strangely territorial about this grand display.
Just like the coloured bands in the scrambled transmission on my TV set, these
seem to carry some hidden message, and holds some remote enchantment, even a
chance at intellectual and spiritual illumination to those who watch. Like the
goddess of dawn, Aurora (or Greek Eos), it heralds of something out there, something
greater, a cryptogram of things to come.
In Aurora Australis, the encrypted television footage from my home TV
appears on the screen, slowed down to a whisper of motion to show the shifting
ribbons of colour and light and the strange flashes of life and fantasy that
they partially obscure, partially reveal. Faces and gestures, figures moving
in different locations, hinting at sport, politics, intrigue, high action, romance.
This work will track the scrambled versions of a few selected programmes and
movies related in some way to the concepts I have written about above.
Given the geographic location of the place where I encounter this televisual
scramble, even if it originates from a totally different source, and the mythological
links to the auroral phenomenon (Aurora, dawn, the east where the sun rises),
I have started to follow broadcasts of movies that in their title or content
have a link with the South (Africa and Australia) and the East (East Germany,
Pakistan, China).
I will engage physically in these images, casting myself as a ‘double’
of some of the actors, replicating certain actions or completing their actions
for them. Picking up on certain themes, I will enter into a physical struggle
with the apparent chaos by wrestling with the colour bands to make way for a
new plot to be revealed. I will become a kind of Augur, trying to interpret,
or decode, a narrative from the storm of cryptic information.
Of course what will be revealed is likely to have nothing to do with the ‘found’
scrambled information, which is precisely the point. Part of my struggle here
will be to show the endless possibilities for poetry in every person’s
grasp of the world in the endless stream of information emitted by the world.
That which the world presents us with is in no way ever straightforward or uncoded.
The struggle to make sense of our histories and experiences, even of our truths,
holds a lot of freedom, but in essence it remains a struggle of great risk,
significance and magnitude. I would like to be able to read the signs of the
world in the same way that the ancient peoples made sense of nature’s everyday
and more uncommon displays.
© Minnette Vári
Johannesburg, September 2001
Artist: Minnette Vári
Title: Aurora Australis
Medium: Video Animation
Date: 2001
Dimensions: Variableprojection
Duration: 9 minutes, looped indefinitely