‘The Big Game The Little Game’ is a experimental short movie we have been working on as a very specific installation piece that shares the theme of "öteberi" for Project 04 in May 2018.
For the technical side, it has a length of 01:34 and has been encoded with H264 codec as an mp4 extension video file. As a thematic piece, it is a non-political political, fictional non-fictional, narrative non-narrative piece. These juxtapositions, inherently carried by the title of the project as well, is intentional as it aims to blur the barrier between those subjects.
We plan for video to feature 32 seemingly unrelated video footages from the world scene. These footages are to be chosen to be instantly recognisable by the viewer (i.e. moon-landing) or feature recognisable faces (Elvis). While preparing the video, we assume at least most of these footages to have an allocated space and meaning in viewers head. Obviously, it would be very hard to find footages that are known by every single viewer. Not only would this be nearly impossible, but thinking that way would result in reduction of profiles of assumed audiences, so it would be expected to have some of the viewers not know some of the footages.
That being so, these little videos will play as chess pieces on a virtual chessboard. Because each video will be allocated to a single square on the board, its size and features will be diminished. That would result in the videos that would otherwise be recognisable to be quite indecipherable in the first glance. What we aim with this is to force the viewer to take up the magnifying glass at the installation and pay time and attention to each piece to try to conjure a meaning.
As some figures and footages will have already established meanings in the viewers head and each piece of chess will have a meaning of its own, we feel that viewers will forced to merge a multiplex meaning out of it, but we plan to make this in vain as each footage will have no inherent relation to the piece it has been assigned to. While it could be a bit on the not-subtle side of the river to put a footage through a ‘pawn’ piece, at the end of the video we want the viewer to feel as if each piece is essentially a game piece, insignificant in the big game. With this understanding, we want to question the importance of each and every incident, big or small, happening around us and how they really effect the way we conduct our lives.
We assume this piece to be non-political because inherently it is devised to have no political leanings. This ‘inherent’ part comes from the fact that videos assigned to each chess piece will not correspond to what those piece come to represent (pawn as pawns or queen as a force to behold). But this non-correspondence will not be apparent at the first glance and only will become blatant once the viewer fails to mine out a coherent plot out of the game.
It is political because we assume to every footage featured in the video to be political in their source in real life. Some of the footages carry more weight in public consciousness, such as one footage that features the victims of Holocaust, while some are very light such as new iPhone keynote presentation but we put all of these footages together to signal a way that each of these come in our lives on a political landscape and effect or enforce power relations between people and peoples. While some viewers could rightly take offence at Holocaust and iPhone consumption being almost equalised in the form of a game, it would not be out of reach to point out every single detail an economic system could enforce power surges that effect people on the other side of the globe.
The piece is narrative because there is a chess game being played and as with every game, there is a story to it. Pieces move in relations to each other that would be improbable to be reproduced as combinations would be limitless, and for someone interested in the chess side of things, it would very well be telling a specific narrative story.
Yet the piece is also non-narrative because as a video art piece, we aim this video to evoke emotions and thoughts more than a narrative plot and as viewers would come and go arbitrarily at random times on a video that’s looped, they will know that they are not expected to follow any particular narrative.
In a similar sense, it is fictional because each role these footages play are arranged so randomly that they could exist in their current form in a fictional setting that is the chessboard, yet as the pattern goes it is also non-fictional because of the nature of the footages themselves. These juxtapositions, we believe work towards a fluid form of binary oppositions that we want the audience to feel.
We believe this main implication falls in line with the theme of “öteberi” which would be roughly translated as “things” and by reducing everything to things, what we are left with, essentially are things.