Sunday 16 November 2008

HOT: The All-Seeing Eye (The Hardcore Techno Version), BFI Southbank Gallery, Southbank

The latest BFI Gallery commission comes from the team behind the quirky film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the artist Pierre Bismuth and director Michel Gondry. You enter a large white room dropped with some white marshmallow cushions in the centre, then sit to watch a spinning camera project a circling image of the same furnished apartment over and over again. Nothing much seems to happen - until you notice that with each rotation the pot plant's missing, and then the chair, and then a window, and then the floor. All this is happening while Eternal Sunshine is being shown on a TV in the apartment. The gradual erasure of the room's features and furnishings looks like the work of CGI, but in fact it was done in real time off-screen, which meant little munchkin people must have been frantically running around removing stuff while the dialogue of the film kept time. Intriguing.

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