(Energy of Delusion) Flaubert said the art of the future would be halfway between algebra and music. This is one possible future. Energy of Delusion is a subjective museum of cinema, with some of the most notoriously engaging and difficult works, each compressed to a minute. It varies from 1 to 1,001 film elements, (plus two text elements), usually installed on 10 iPads playing back all the films asynchronously, creating “a stochastic montage.” Here you will see three elements one at a time, based respectively on Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Guy Debord’s la société du spectacle, and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Each element’s title encrypts the title of the original film and its length in minutes. The end credit encrypts the name(s) of the author of the original film and a signature of reauthoring. The effects of this selection, compression and encryption vary with each viewer: from abrupt repulsion, to frenetic fascination, to the ecstatic grasp of a vast sweep of time in a single instant. The title of the project echoes a phrase of Tolstoy quoted by Shklovsky in his Energy of Delusion.

biografia

Keith Sanborn is a media artist, theorist and translator. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Catskill, New York. His artistic practice includes film, video, photography, installation, and performance. That work has been the subject of numerous one-person shows and has been featured in major museum surveys including the Whitney Biennial (twice), the American Century, and Monter/Sampler (Centre Pompidou) and festivals including EMAF, OVNI, and The Rotterdam International Film Festival. His theoretical work has appeared in Artforum, various anthologies and exhibition catalogs for MoMA, the San Francisco Cinematheque and others. He has translated into English the work of Debord, Viénet, Wolman, Bataille, Napoleon, Gioli, Peixoto, Brecht, Farocki, Kuleshov and Shub. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Bard, UCSD, SUNY/Buffalo, the New School and the San Francisco Art Institute, among others. He now blissfully ignores academia and devotes his time to his intellectual and artistic pursuits.

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