Hearsay
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AUGURAL PAIR
TEX HEX: Past Forward
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FEAR
The Evacuation Route Project
Power/Exchange
PARK


The Line: Selected Works I-XVI
Feeling Tone
The Swallows
The Name is not the Thing named
Tactical Uses of a Belief 2...
Tactical Uses of a Belief...
Four Act Balance
90042
Ahbyezyana
Deathworld
Flight Paths
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Geologic Listening
Cinematographa
Los Muertos: Unwrite Them...
All Sound Seeks a Body
Boh!
Keeler is where the postbox is.
Radical Listener
Viva la Gap
Of Cinema
Lucid Dreaming
The Willamette Meteorite
A Note to films that...
The Shit of the Sun
The Orchestration of Time
Yes, Virginia...
Falls the Shadow
Tactical Uses of a Belief...
Can Architecture be...
Caballos de Vigilancia
Crossword Puzzles
99 Concerns
Objects Designed for...
Power/Exchange
PARK


Deborah Stratman Deborah Stratman Deborah Stratman Deborah Stratman Deborah Stratman Deborah Stratman Deborah Stratman Deborah Stratman

Four Act Balance
2007, 15 minutes, 4-channel installation

Project Description

The poem is not
a rule-bound crossing
but rather an offering,
a lawless proposition.

- Alain Badiou


Four Act Balance is a 4-channel video installation/poem, conceived for the National Palace Museum of Taiwan in response to the feature-length experimental documentary Kings of the Sky. Both pieces focus upon indigenous minority tightrope walkers in Muslim Western China.

Four Act Balance arose from a desire to seek out a new kind of temporal logic: that of concurrency, of the spatial, of the body. The viewer is called upon to actively resituate him/herself in space, balancing their attention between four screens, each facing inwards as walls to a room. By dismembering and transplanting ideas, the older content is destabilized and yet fortified. While strong carry-over of political sentiment and cultural observation from the documentary remain, Four Act Balance is a film experience in it’s own right, wholly independent of the earlier film.

Meaning can be political only when it does not let itself be easily stabilized. And when it does not rely on any single source of authority, but rather empties authority, or decentralizes it.

- Trinh Minh-ha


Apply oneself to insignificant images.
Let feelings bring about events, not the other way.
Fortify ideas by transplanting them.
Unbalance so as to rebalance.

- Robert Bresson


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