Keep Your Guard Up

Dispⁿ series
Interactive image, on the web and as installation, 2000
Samuel Bianchini

Programming: Christoph Salaün (web)
and Oussama Mubarak (installation)
To access the online work: http://tagarde.dispotheque.org

To download this image in HD (Tiff), click here

Keep Your Guard Up, Samuel Bianchini, 2000
Maintenance, solo show, École européenne supérieure de l’image, Poitiers, France, from May to June, 2010.
Photographs: © Samuel Bianchini - ADAGP

The installation Keep Your Guard Up shows two boxers fighting through counterposed images. Set side by side (on the computer screen), or at an angle (in the installation), the image repeats the same set in both cases: a boxing ring. There is a boxer in each image; one springs to action, stealthily, as soon as the spectator rolls over the other with the cursor (using the mouse or touch screen). When the cursor is positioned on the screen on the right, it prompts an action from the boxer on the left, and vice versa. The dynamic remains annoying even after the spectator gets it: it throws movement and gaze out of synch; it is not ergonomic. Should I move left, or right? Is accelerating perhaps the way to approximate and synchronize the two protagonists in space and time? Each one is, by turns, in action, and so too is the viewer. A three-way combat emerges. The initial injunction, ‘Keep your guard up!’, addressed at first to one boxer and then to the other, is gradually turned towards this ‘third person’, the viewer interposed between the images.

Keep Your Guard Up, Samuel Bianchini, 2000
Video - 41s - High band request
Images and editing: © Samuel Bianchini - ADAGP

To download this image in HD (Tiff), click here

Keep Your Guard Up, Samuel Bianchini, 2000
Palais de Tokyo - Site de création contemporaine, Paris, from November to December, 2004.
Photographs: © Samuel Bianchini - ADAGP