Pierre Hébert
2 multimedia performances
“Only the hand that erases can write the truth” + “Animation Exercises” 
Tuesday September 29, 2009 - 21:30h.
INIT, via della Stazione Tuscolana 133, Roma
10 Euro
“Only the Hand” music by Stefan Smulovitz
For this duet, I choose to work from a sentence that had been brought to my attention by my French friend Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, an eminent specialist of Pasolini and of animation cinema : Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. Hervé knew very well that this sentence would interest me for many reasons : the fact that it expresses itself in the form of a paradox and also the fact that that it centers on the gesture of erasing which had become a central element of my live animation performances. He has heard about “the sentence” during a conference given by professor Carlo Ossola. Skipping the details, I should say that this sentence was apocryphally attributed to the German mystic Master Eckart. At any rate, this idea of associating truth and erasing has a very ancient history. Traces of it are found a bit everywhere, in the Gospels, in Dante amongst others. - Pierre Hébert
“Animation Exercises” music by Bob Ostertag
This project started as an experiment about non-linear animation which developed away from the public eye in the intimacy of my studio. They were studio performances that I have been doing once a day for an entire week. The objective was to explore how a very short segment of evolving animation (16 frames) could relate to itself through repetition and through simple formal video processing done digitally (reversing the direction of the flow, changing speed, shuffling the order of the images, three layers compositing, etc.). The animation is done manually on a white board with a dry erase felt pen, each of the drawings is recorded in a very short digital buffer so that after the 16th drawing, every new drawing override the oldest of the existing images in the loop. - Pierre Hébert
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