BETWEEN PLACES is a master film made by Loes Vanneste.
She plunged herself into a residual product, a banal piece of dust, something meaningless, that is always present in every place, every wind and under every bed. Unnoticed, the dust particles move about, gradually accumulating into a gray, downy mass. They fill the cracks and holes we unknowingly pass by. We live through them, not with them. According to a description from the Bible gospel, we and everything around us are dust. We emerge from it and decay back into it: "For he knows we are but dust and that our days are few and brief, like grass, like flowers, blown by the wind and gone forever." Dust here symbolizes a kind of transition space, a liminal phase in which form and life decays into an amorphous mass and just as quickly and solid whether lifeless or not will rise from it. So she started looking at the dust she gathered in her room with a microscope. As a discoverer/scientist she created a liminal dream with the the beautiful world she discovered in a piece of dust.
Synopsis:
Somewhere in the depths of space, the thoughts and memories of what once was are flying around. There lies the palace of dust, inhabited by a transparent beast that rearranges, shifts and consumes all particles of dust. "Where am I?" Sounds in the open space. It's a woman who has been led by her dream to the palace of dust. Her physical body lies horizontally on the bed, but her voice, her mind, is inside the palace. In this feverish dream the beast takes her through the spaces of the palace and tells her about the value of dust and transition. The beast makes her look "Through the glass, darkly" or through the dust, darkly" ( in an imperfect or obscure way ) at a world she thought she new...
"We always used to call it dirt, blind to this whole universe. Only now do we realize how privileged dust mites actually are.
They live in palaces of amazing beauty and it has never once crossed their minds to vanish into a cloud of dust."
Josef Haslinger & Klaus Pichler
more in depth info:
Loes was getting fascinated by the dust she picked up in her room. What is this gray mass al about? What does it say and what does it consist of? So she put a dust bunny onder her microscope and discovered a new fragmented world that reflects on what she does in her room and what the world outside exists of. A grey mass that gathers lost components of an already fragmented world. They intertwine and uncohesively form a amorf structure that changes body with the wind.
So she started collecting dust by sweeping up the ground, dusting her books and emptying the vacuum cleaner bag and started investigated it under a microscope.
She made videos and took pictures. the pictures she took were beautiful but lacked a sense oof movement. She needed to come up with ways on how the make the silent pictures move. She started experimenting with these pictures in after effects, but realized she didn't really liked the quality of it and wanted a different look and feel. The videos she shot were already very serene and slow and she wanted something a bit more chaotic to show this fragmented side of dust. Then she stumbled upon A.I. opensource projects such as Dall-e, stable diffusion and Dream by WOMBO.
She started putting my pictures into Dall-e 2 and generated variations of them and out of these pictures she made sequences inside After Effects. These results fitted her ideas on dust better.
Why AI? As dust is a fragmented being, she thinks A.I. has a similar structure, a similar body. It’s, like dust, a pulverized space, where bits and pieces float in a ‘virtual’ place of transition, waited to be formed. It’s true, when you use a program like stable diffusion or Dall-e 2 you only see the outcome and so it’s not fragmented anymore, but Loes thinks the processing must be interesting and by making these sequences she want to try to understand how this system works, maybe she'll find a way to understands the system and structure of dust itself.
Sound:
The sound is as the image a microscopic fragment of our world. With thee help of SuperCollider (a code software for sound) Nicolas Van Moreau created a code that would cut the sounds we recorded into microscopic little pieces and rearrange them in a random order. together with only voice recordings and the code Nicolas and Loes created the sound for Between places.
Techniques used: Stop-motion, 2d animation and lifeaction
Duration: 8'57"
Aspect ratio: Scope (2.39:1)
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