MIGUEL ANGEL RIOS: Multiple Video Event
David Hatchett
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>Walking through Artists Space, I
hear a sound track coming from a back room. It sounds like billiard balls
colliding or airplanes sweeping in on their targets. The quick strike, the
clattering of chairs exploding, an air raid on Baghdad? A sign outside the room
says it is a film by Miguel Angel Rios, called Tops
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>I enter the room and I am
confronted with three screens, the walls of an open-ended rectangle. Giant
tops, approximately five feet tall careen across the black and white
projections and flash through the empty space between the screens. Three
cameras record the same scene from different vantage points, all three in sync.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>They are recording a street game in
Mexico City, where kids spin tops into a limited space, in this case over a
squared off grid, to see whose top is left standing when all others have been
knocked down. Each camera is low to the ground and close-up, making the tops
appear to be gigantic and spinning over the horizon. At one point, a top comes
crashing into the camera that is recording the center screen image, knocking
the camera view out. The video images were one take only, so it was fortunate
that a fourth camera was recording the scene from above, allowing the middle
screen image to seamlessly change to the overhead view, maintaining the
integrity of the overall installation.
The
dramatic conclusion of the multiple video event is a giant top winding down
from its tight spin, a solid tornado on a surreal landscape, simultaneously
viewed straight on with tops scattered to the side. Viewed from above the scene
and then again from behind the fallen tops, all three synchronized. The top’s
trajectory is getting wider and wider as its spin slows and the sound track
moves the sound around in an ever widening circle. The top is leaning closer
and closer to the ground, spinning around its steel contact point, and finally
dropping behind the fallen tops around it. This single-take recording, turned a
Mexico City street game into a live action, multi-faceted video sculptural
event, removed from its origin by time, space, or any primary POV.
