Ouvrage

The movement that Nathalie Bujold breathes into her video works acts like water –infiltrating everything and wiping away edges. Unfettered and fragmented, the deconstructed image loses its initial reference and becomes a flowing river, a fluid interweaving. With this alteration of the digital matter, of “the very material of images ... the electronic material becomes semiotic substance,”² as the art historian René Payant wrote presciently in a 1986 essay about pre-digital video. And so, our attention is redirected toward the pixel as common denominator, and to flow as vector of movement. Starting from these two digital “states” – pixel and flow – it is possible to enter, traverse, and “surf” on the image. Whether digital or pre-digital, the video image bears within itself a multitude of temporalities ingrained in its very materiality. For more than fifteen years, Bujold has produced bodies of work through which she configures and reconfigures these possible timeframes.

Initially, her main intention was to reduce the material weight of her practice by abandoning sculptural objects for the potential of the image in movement, but she soon began to transpose into her video explorations some of the themes that she was already working with, including that of the motif. The motif encompasses principles of recurrence and form. It can be infinitely repeated or isolated at the core of its own multiplication. In her video Les trains où vont les choses (2006), she multiplied the video image in an on-screen grid for the first time; this allowed her to introduce a rhythmic gap, both aural and visual. She then added complexity with multi-screen multi-channel works in which certain elements of the image in movement became nomadic motifs within a compartmentalized, orchestrated composition.

Time x movement = redefining the rules of scale and liberating oneself from the moment

In the video triptych Études vidéographiques pour instruments à cordes (2015), Bujold began to work with multiple channels. This strategy for cutting up the image enabled her to create compositions, almost in the musical sense of the term. In fact, her musical training greatly influences how she works with video, a skill at which she is self-taught. Here, she expressed her desire to explore the potential of variation through repetition of a motif. The bodies of work that followed were marked by a certain economy of means in her production. The principle of making much with little can be likened to do-it-yourself and recycling, even patching. A reference to textiles is present in Études vidéographiques pour instruments à cordes: the isolation of one element amid the grouping and its multiplied recomposition evoke quilting patterns. In such reconfigurations from a single visual element, the meaning of the first image is subsumed in a new proposal that can redefine the initial narrative thread. In this sense, we brush up against fractal logic and, in a way, approach the notion of the infinite. When a modulation, whether visual or audio, encounters no limitations to its expansion, does it not cross the space-time frontier? Freed from its original purposes, it no longer belongs to the same perceptual schema or the same rule of scale: the modulation in question transcends the measurable states with which we are familiar.

The Métroscopies series, ongoing since 2021, is presented as a collection of space-time crossings. It consists of sequences that take us, in real time, from station to station in the Montréal metro. These sequences, however, subvert the usual course of time and distort our idea of travelling from point A to point B. Here, Bujold creates a particular point of view: we come, it seems, as close as possible to the ultimate unit of the moving image: the pixel. Then, with the deceleration into each station, the image sometimes dwells on reality for a moment, releasing from the digital weft a few seconds of daily life. Alternating between an abstract plastic position and an almost-documentary witnessing of reality, this video series draws in its wake a reflection on our perceptual mechanisms, which colour our comprehension of the world: our capacity to recognize and identify our environment is the subject of a relatively specific framing. Similarly, memory evolves under the aegis of its own internal rules: it is altered by the duration and distancing of the moment; the image blurs in places while retaining certain contours, fragments of clarity, and zooms forward toward memory’s centre. Métroscopies is presented as a series of observations (scopes) of movement in space and in time made possible by digital capture. In a way, the series offers a redefinition of the notion of “moment,” which we tend to associate with a state of immobility, such as the stopped action in a photographic image. Yet, everything is in perpetual motion, even if only at its molecular core.

Movement x velocity = reversing stability and revealing the hidden order

As counterintuitive as it might seem at first glance, movement and immobility are more interrelated than they are opposed: they exist and coexist in correspondence to each other. A textile can similarly be extended be as long as one conserves its initial cohesion by not cutting the fibre that underlies the ensemble. By definition, a weft links and crosses: it’s both the basis and the connection; in this sense, it refers as much to immobility as to movement. In the series Les fleurs du tapis, made in 2018, Bujold explores the very question of connection in the image in movement. She also dwells on getting tangled up in details (the Québécois expression is s’enfarger dans les fleurs du tapis) – the immaterial motifs that metaphorically trip us up. This use of the vernacular, which appears in the titles of many of Bujold’s works³, refers us back to the hidden meaning of things and the broad reach of a simple formulation. Through the intangibility of language, the “tangled details” are suddenly embodied and materialized. They come alive and emerge from the background: they are details of the image, undulating in a parallel space-time in which the alteration of a given moment takes on a particular consistency, foreign to the known laws of reality. In the video works Avancée d’un point de fuite éperdue (2018) and Transport du débordement de nos inquiétudes (2018), as well as the sub-series Balade du refus de toute intention (2018) – to name just a few examples – this relationship between immobility and movement takes the form of a temporal deployment; as Bujold says, “you unfold time.” Bridges, ships, and other features at the water’s edge become open, living, wavering entities that overturn our perceptual stability.

Other sub-series, “concealed” within Les fleurs du tapis – for example, Descente de la poursuite dans la joie (2018) and Aller-retour dans l’inconnu qui attend à pied d’œuvre (2018) – offer a point of view that is closer to the matrix. Here, we enter into the details – or, rather, the landscape, both natural and urban. The image is segmented to suggest an almost atomic perspective of its visual content, a point of view that immerses us in the asperities of the pixel – evoking, in passing, the disordered, chaotic intrusion of the glitch. But there is a hidden order to these works, an internal logic that flows from the background weft over which the image glides. It reveals an entire series of formal proposals that quickly bring us back to quilting, to textiles, but also to composition and orchestration, even choreography. Indeed, the interwoven, duplicated, inverted, and multiplied motifs are dancing. The velocity and luminosity of the video sequences, assembled in a grid with variable subdivisions, generate a rhythmic, kaleidoscopic geometry. Occasionally, parallaxes redefine the grouping, drawing new lines that reunify the image. Déplacement des habiles singeries académiques (2018) and Route des vertiges qui nous prennent à la tombée des oripeaux (2018) are just two examples of the many videos produced for this portion of the Les fleurs du tapis corpus. Rather than stretch out the linearity of a shift and altering its duration – or, at least, its perception – these videos condense its visual potential in an accelerated and recursive space-time loop. These are works in the Op Art tradition – except that here the eye remains passive, because it is the image in motion that generates the visual effect. Les fleurs du tapis is also available in multi-channel mode in the series Manège (à trois, quatre ou cinq), begun in 2018 and ongoing.

Time x movement x velocity = the anchoring of sound and its cohesive capacity

Sound plays a prominent role in most of Bujold’s video series: the strategy of subdividing the image also transforms the audio dimension. As mentioned above, Bujold’s musical training – specifically, in piano – has a sizable influence on her visual work. When she recomposes the image into temporal slices, the sound linked to the initial sequence follows the same rhythmic cutting. In “Introduction to Themes & Variations,” John Cage wrote, “Nonintention (the acceptance of silence) leading to nature; renunciation of control; let sounds be sounds.”⁴ Of the many aphorisms contained in Cage’s foundational essay, published in 1982, this one speaks about a certain conception of sound and how it inhabits and contributes to the world. Whatever happens, whatever movement or gesture one makes, its own audio reality accompanies it. In Bujold’s video works, we note the double non-intentional presence of sound: on the one hand is the ambient sound of the recording; on the other hand is the audio arising from the sequential editing, a gridded cutting that, by default, generates a state of visual and audio variation. The sound thus becomes a material relative to the space, worked by time. The result is a totally cohesive cohabitation between image and sound in which the reality of one is anchored in the wake of the other.

Microcosm x macrocosm = nothing exists outside of time

In one of his essays in VEDUTE, René Payant wrote, “Video is time: the present that passes – that is, the default image – and at the same time the past that persists by returning – that is, excess images. In other words, the present is constructed at the same time as the past. The video image apparently lets us experience this space (of division) where we see time. Where we see it, because it is there that time is.”⁵ Bujold’s body of work titled Nocturnes (2018–21) is in continuity with those discussed above, in that an initial sequence constitutes the unit from which a brand-new proposal is composed that is not only visual but also spatial and temporal. In the video Vol de nuit (2018),⁶ for example, the sequence of a night-time landing at the Toronto airport is finely cut, reframed, then multiplied and rearranged in a motif whose repetition recalls quilting of fabric, or even embroidery of the thread that traverses it. As much as it evokes familiar textiles, the work opens to the image of an expanding universe. It is as if we had before us simultaneously a microcosm and a macrocosm merged into one and the same thing, whose visible movement seems oriented both inward and outward, compressing and liberating the image at once. Vol de nuit is a “temporal panorama,” as Bujold says – an accommodation between past, present, and future evoking the fabric of time itself.

Each work in Nocturnes is composed of luminous sequences shot at night, processed in a variety of ways. Whereas Vol de nuit presents an obvious relationship with Études vidéographiques pour instruments à cordes in that it “fractalizes” the content of the initial sequence, Ronde de nuit (2018) takes up the modus operandi of Métroscopies, with accelerations and decelerations, activating a diffraction effect. In both cases, the suggestion of a space-time shift is reinforced by the presence of a glow whose sources are sometimes difficult to identify. In this sense, the Nocturnes corpus resonates with the iconic “Stargate Sequence” in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which illustrates a passage through space-time – the power held by the speed of light. Being alive necessarily involves time; what can we see when we move into and, speculatively, cross it?

Seeing time =

“Video is not space but time,”⁷ said Nam June Paik. Time, doubled with a perspective, a gaze. A video, of whatever kind, tells us, “This is what I see.” Bujold’s works tell us, “I see time. I make and unmake it, figure and reconfigure it.” Time, though, proves to be elusive. Because it occupies a particular spectrum of visibility, we don’t perceive it fully, through the veil of duration, until afterward. It passes and, like water, it traverses, infiltrates, and alters. “The laws of dynamics are indifferent to the direction of time,” wrote Emmanuel Hocquard in L’invention du verre. In other words, time’s dynamic and direction evolve in parallel without necessary contradicting each other. Similarly, Bujold’s fluidly interweaving images surf on the background weft, which is solidly inscribed in the duration of the video capture – that of the transition between two metro stations; of the momentary contemplation of a bridge; of the perspective offered by a plane landing; of crossing a boulevard at a corner, at night, in the rain. The movement of this interweaving is time that slips, like liquid, over the objects of the world, moving and unmoving all at once – filtering the motifs that figure our lives.