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Apparatus (1998)
1998
Single Channel Video
00:03:40
In Apparatus, Lancaster glasses, normally used to evaluate a kind stereo-blindness in children called Suppression is de-territorialized into a sex toy. The action takes place in a young girls playhouse in which glasses first become projection devices creating a minimalist light show on the blank white ceiling. The ceiling first acts as a screen and is subsequently substituted by the face. We first witness the rotating green and red light creating a hypnotic trance in the actor before the camera moves to capture his hands caressing the cold metal tubes. Here they are transformed into a phallus and become instruments which help evoke a masturbation ritual. As they are moved closer and closer to the eyes their double red-green image is concentrated into one, a third eye which appears pixilated and fuzzy. This is the crucial moment of the video; is in this coming together that the psyche of the body splits and the characters “other” is exposed. The neuro-ophthalmologic device, recontextualized in this psychic drama, has now become psychoanalytic probe with which to expose and open up the subconscious. The light changes to a machine gun like strobe light that penetrates the body. All of sudden the silence of the film is animated and a woman’s voice, the writer Kris Krauss, takes over. The “he” becomes a “she” and now the story becomes a Batallian Farce in which the narrator, now a woman, asks her self if it is possible to be fucked by the light. Is the light a sexual organ?