Symbol Transfer
João Farelo
PT
Video projection and sound

Convento dos Remédios, Évora
July 7th, 11PM

Symbol Transfer is an installation that drives us through a journey of permanent re:mediation, in which the act of mapping is replaced by analogic photograph, re:captured by scanning, re:converted into a digital photgraph and, finally, re:invented into algoritms and sounds.

A dot signals an exact site in a net of parallelepipeds, which the abstract map of Lisbon. This is the starting point for this project – the site where a black an white photograph was captured. This same photograph, revealed, scanned and project on a white wall is re:captured in a studio in Évora. And it is only in this moment that the photo is analyzed: processed by a computer, following a procedure grounded on the opposite function of Fourier’s transformation, converted into a sonic range, which here and now disappears in slow-motion, before the eyes of the spectators. Light is transformed into sound. An horizontal curtain seems to fill it. The same curtain that in the photographic cameras of the 60’s was needed to reveal the image, letting the light pass through the lens and burn the film. Now, this curtain veils the remains of that instant which, passing from medium to medium, from documented reality to mathematic abstraction, disappears before our eyes. What happened to that specific site and that specific time whose coordinated remain fixed on the map?

João Farelo attends the MA Visual Arts/Multimedia, at University of Évora. Since 2005 he attends workshops on photography, digital art and design.