contemporary media artists take up the worn dictates of avant-garde film—the stringent regulations that enforce transparency, materiality, structure within the frame and inscribe a unified masculine vision—to intentionally uncannily upend such restrictions within video. Bopape gestures to a queer transformation of sight through her insistence on a doubled and contingent body, an alteration that carries over to Carolyn Lazard’s Red (2021), which also expands the frame with a repetition, albeit with double projection. In Lazard’s two-channel installation, one screen (outside the room) offers an access note. Green text pulses to indicate to viewers when the second channel (inside the room) flickers. Disturbing the binary of on and off, for some the work functions as the strobe advances, for others it only functions as the light retreats. The contingency resonates with the blurring of the titular color, which also breaks down the unity of vision. The varied gradient shifts from coral to vermilion, from scarlet to crimson. Like Bopape, Lazard crafted the frames with touch, pushing their finger back and forth over their iPhone camera. We see their caress as collected by the lens. The doubled projection generates indeterminancy, opening up the work to those with photosensitive sight. If Lazard unyokes the unity of sight with home-made strobe, Apichatpong Weerasethakul does so through the doubled play of light on water. The view in Weerasethakul’s two-channel work, For Bruce (2022), oscillates between a mid-shot of a wooden bridge spanning a brook to the birds- eye view of the wooden planks reflected on the quivering surface. His fluid assembling of dappled light and rippling plane suggests illusory images.
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