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Sergio Prego, “Black Monday”(to view video: look up artists, Sergio Prego, video of selected work)

Black Monday

The Yerba Buena Gallery in San Francisco had a digital arts exhibition that ran until November 11, 2007 called “Dark Matters, Artists see the Impossible”. Various digital artists displayed their works in visuals, sounds and installations. There were many interesting works in the exhibit, but one I found intriguing was ‘Black Monday’ by Sergio Prego.

I walked around to the back of the gallery to encounter this partly enclosed video installation and was riveted in place by the sounds and visuals. There is a large screen video that flashes jolting images of an explosion fused with an electronic music. The images create a dizzying, vertigo effect. The ‘glitch’ soundtrack is disjointed and repetitive.

Prego staged explosions with flares in a large open warehouse. He used a ring of synchronized cameras to capture stages of the blast and the plume of smoke at fixed moments in time. Over 1000 photos were taken, scanned, then digitally composited into a film that rotates 360 degrees around the explosion. The 3 minute film uses a stop-motion technique, where the camera moves but the subject doesn’t (like in “The Matrix”). There is a zoom in and zoom out that occurs through each rotation of the film, probably due to blocking structures in the studio, but this amplifies the visual effect.

Prego creates a ‘hyperreal’ environment where authentic representation is altered and amplified. It could also be seen as a type of synthetic realism. His digitally manipulated images merge with the electronic sounds and create a surreal environment that would be visually impossible otherwise. Prego obviously wants truth and simplicity in his work because he kept his methodology obvious, and you can see the cameras on tripods surrounding the explosion.

Prego challenges the conventional notion time, space and navigation by manipulating different perspectives of a single moment in time. It forces us to look at how we comprehend relationships within visual images. He also explores our tendency to simplify patterns of events into sequences and manageably consistent images in an otherwise chaotic world.

I was most impressed with how Prego converted a series of still life photos into a 3 dimensional sculptural shape in video. It is a type of digital photogrammetry and a way of reinterpreting images. The explosion becomes an entity that is manipulated into a non-static sculpture. Each vapor of smoke is immobilized in time and space and transformed into a static tangible form, and then evaporates. His work can be seen as a ‘spectacle’ in that it is an event that has moved into the realm of representation.

Prego’s installation also brings to the forefront the topical aspect of explosions and their association with tragic and bloody outcomes, which gives the work a more ominous overtone.