Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, 1998
Still: Courtesy the artist | Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Galería Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid
Collection
Single-channel video installation, color, sound
17 min 30 sec
Prego's video work references the 1989 science fiction film "Tetsuo: The Iron Man", whose title character is a cult figure in Japanese fantasy cinema. In his work Prego becomes a kind of decadent superhero flying over the environs of Bilbao, Spain. Since 1998 Prego's work has been strongly marked by the use of a system that captures a single moment simultaneously from several viewpoints. The fragmented perception that results from this system is then rebuilt, using techniques that approach traditional craft methods, to create a new perspective that upsets the usual relations between space and time, between the body and its surroundings. For Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, the artist arranged forty cameras in a circle around him, which simultaneously capture an action that he performs. Various actions that took place around Bilbao or in the artists' studio were recorded using this system, and when every moment was captured forty times from a different angle and the resulting footage was edited to show one shot after the other, situations that otherwise would hardly be recognizable became visible. The studio in its largest sense serves the artist as an encapsulated space/refuge for experimentation, excluding viewers from the moment of creation and permitting access only at a later stage of publicness. Another important layer established by Prego is the way he uses and understands sound, relating electronic music to a way of understanding the body inside space and how the perception of time is determined by our physical ability to move inside space. Peio Aguirre has noted that electronic music also carries with it a description of spaces in which it is performed: "(large industrial stores, peripheral spaces in the nocturnal dynamics of the city). These are the only spaces of freedom, which are left, redoubts of a postmodern narrative inaugurated with the depressive deafening of the background noise in Lynch's Eraserhead".
*1969 in San Sebastian, Spain I Living and working in New York, USA
17 min 30 sec
Prego's video work references the 1989 science fiction film "Tetsuo: The Iron Man", whose title character is a cult figure in Japanese fantasy cinema. In his work Prego becomes a kind of decadent superhero flying over the environs of Bilbao, Spain. Since 1998 Prego's work has been strongly marked by the use of a system that captures a single moment simultaneously from several viewpoints. The fragmented perception that results from this system is then rebuilt, using techniques that approach traditional craft methods, to create a new perspective that upsets the usual relations between space and time, between the body and its surroundings. For Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, the artist arranged forty cameras in a circle around him, which simultaneously capture an action that he performs. Various actions that took place around Bilbao or in the artists' studio were recorded using this system, and when every moment was captured forty times from a different angle and the resulting footage was edited to show one shot after the other, situations that otherwise would hardly be recognizable became visible. The studio in its largest sense serves the artist as an encapsulated space/refuge for experimentation, excluding viewers from the moment of creation and permitting access only at a later stage of publicness. Another important layer established by Prego is the way he uses and understands sound, relating electronic music to a way of understanding the body inside space and how the perception of time is determined by our physical ability to move inside space. Peio Aguirre has noted that electronic music also carries with it a description of spaces in which it is performed: "(large industrial stores, peripheral spaces in the nocturnal dynamics of the city). These are the only spaces of freedom, which are left, redoubts of a postmodern narrative inaugurated with the depressive deafening of the background noise in Lynch's Eraserhead".
*1969 in San Sebastian, Spain I Living and working in New York, USA
