Fernando is a magician who brings us to different universes. So he can do it if we are going to co-exist with him, let him guide us. Also, he has an effect as hypnotising… There is a bunch of different references… I can notice popular culture, high culture, ritual, religion, anti culture,mythology, marketing – Coca Cola, Apple, which might be a new religion. By Anna Volkland / Silent Period during Battle of Critics at Garage Contemporary Museum of Art 2018 [THE CAVE]
This is, probably, the strangest interpretation of Plato`s myth of the cave, which I`ve ever seen. And in order to capture its meaning I`d like to draw your attention to several issues. The first is this vibrant, psychedelic visual aspect of the piece, which draws on glitch, vaporwave and retrofuturistic aesthetics dealing with pop culture, technologies, consumerism, internet art and nostalgia. Capturing viewers attention, it immerses us into affective images, which become a spectacular environment, kind of new digital nature, producing its “inhabitant” (Belfiore), and its “natural” elements: “the cave” (which is a plastic tent), “the stones” (made of foam plastic). This environment is technology-based, flat (as the wall of Plato`s cave, where the shadows are casted), affective and semantic: it is always in flow, importing images from its endless memory and archive — corporate brands as well as ancient figurines of elephants and monkeys. As in postmodern project, it confronts the idea of history, mixing images of the past, present and future, of pop culture and prehistoric art, giving them the same status of simulacrums or shadows. The second point is the dancer, a caveman and an inhabitant of this digital nature of signs. It seems, he is being trapped, infected, transformed by this vivid visuality. Images are based on code, adverts and brands, as well as all capitalist production, are based on rationality. But when being embodied in performer`s presence, technologies make their insane and esoteric entity visible. It seems, Belfiore wants us to think, how our flat digital environment can produce contemporary corporeality. Balancing a powerful emotional impact and nuanced reflection, this work raises vital questions in our post-internet world. Anna Kozonina (Russia) Silent Period during Battle of Critics at Garage Contemporary Museum of Art 2018 [THE CAVE]
For this short work, Belfiore is playing with the idea of light installations and projections.
Belfiore creates psychedelic installations and plays with constructed atmospheres by projecting colors, live recording, images for green screen and animations. Projections are the presentation of an image on a surface, for example on a cinema screen or a mental image viewed as reality. But projections are also an estimate or forecast of a future situation based on a study of present trends.
Manipulating image, sounds and objects live and on the video, Belfiore layers the virtual and investigates constructed realities, and questioning on the screen world we are living in.As a Live Dj for his own dance Belfiore ‘vaporwaves” the theatrical space. The subculture surrounding vaporwave is often associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and popular culture and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades which Belfiore bring to question our own times.
Belfiore is also inspired time by the documentary ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ by Werner Herzog (2013) and the allegory of Plato’s cave. Belfiore dives deep into his unconsciousness to reveal his wild creativity and inquietudes of human conditions into his (hand)made universes.
Concept, Choreography and Performance Fernando Belfiore Outside Eye Charlot Van der Meer and Vincent Riebeek Light, Video, Sound and Text Fernando Belfiore Video Effect Jeremy From AlexEtJeremy Craft Maaike Fransen Creation support by Residencies of Beam Lab, Dansmakers with thanks to Suzy Blok, Moving Futures and EAD with thanks to José Fernando Peixoto de Azevedo Production Dansmakers Amsterdam and DANSCO Photography Courtesy: Pierre balling, Thomas Lenden, PaulMcGee and Thiemi Higashi
DATES
2018
26 January De NWE Vorst Tilburg
7th February Kikker, Utrecht
17th February Grandtheater, Groningen
6th March Stadtheater, Mainz
31st March Dansmakers Amsterdam
21 July Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (RU)
2019
26 February THE CAVE OCCI SpellBound queer party Amsterdam
23 MayTHE CAVE at Arti et Amicitie Zachtzinnig Radicaal Festival Amsterdam
Photo Above : Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (RU)
We have Plato’s cave, this is tired. I propose we replace shadows w/ game film, walls screaming “thats just a great T-E stunt right there.”zizeck
Whereas, to quote the philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek, ”Say, are the puppeteers who deal with the shapes political manipulators, so that Plato also proposes an implicit theory of ideological manipulation, or are we, cavemen, directly deluding ourselves? However, there is a deeper problem here, which could be best put in Hegel’s terms.
One can, of course, start with the naïve notion of people perceiving true reality from a limited/distorted perspective and thus constructing in our imagination false idols which we mistake for the real thing; the problem with this naïve notion is that it reserves for us the external position of a neutral observer who can, from his safe place,
compare true reality with its distorted mis(perception).
What gets lost here is that we all ARE these people in the case-so how can we, immersed into the cave’s spectacle, as it were step onto our own shoulder and gain insight into true reality?” J E P – Number 18 – 2004 / 1 ”Burned by the Thing” Slavoj Zizek http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number18/zizek.htm
Photography above by Pierre Ballings
SCREENS PROJECTIONS SIMULATIONS FORMS
HOW CAN WE ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FORMS?© Michael Lacewing
Those people in Plato’s republic who eventually acquire knowledge of the Forms are those guardians who become philosophers. The guardians are trained in arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy to bring them to dianoia. But to achieve noésis, the guardians must be additionally trained in dialectic or philosophical argument. For further discussion of this argument, see the handout on ‘Plato’s similes of the Cave and the Divided Line’.
Plato argues that to gain knowledge of the Forms, a person must be ‘re-oriented’, away from being concerned and caught up in the world of the senses: ‘the mind as a whole must be turned away from the world of change until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which is what we call the good’ (518c). The final step in the philosophers’ education is not so much about imparting knowledge, and but turning the mind towards the Forms. However, the question still remains how dialectic leads to an understanding of the Forms.
In fact, Plato doesn’t say. One theory is that, as shown in Plato’s The Republic and other dialogues, dialectic establishes both the existence and the nature of the Forms. Another relates to the fact that the Forms are ‘one-over-many’. A Form is unitary and simple, but many particular things can participate in it. There is only one Form of Beauty, but many things can be beautiful. Mathematics helps us to understand the idea of ‘one-over-many’, and helps us understand how the ‘one’ is the real essence that the many shares in. For example, mathematics establishes the necessary properties that all triangles must have in
common. And all existing triangles are triangles because they share the essential properties of the Form of the Triangle. Dialectic helps us understand this more generally, or abstractly because it searches for a unifying account of each and everything. Dialectic asks ‘what is justice?’ or ‘what is courage?’, and so we think about the abstract ideas, the Forms, of justice and courage.
carl sagan 34:00 13
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
-Are you saying that your attempt to understand the fundamental operations of nature lead you to a set of equations that are indistinguishable from the equations that drive search engines and browsers on our computers
-Yeah that is correct
I SHOULD DIE SYMBOLICALLY EVERYDAY
Photography above courtesy by Thomas Lenden
Photography above courtesy by Paul mcGee
Photos above, courtesy by Thiemi Higashi
