Darko Fritz - End of the Message

The End of the Message project (1995-2000) investigates the behaviours and movements of people when faced with old and new media in both culturally significant space and public space.  This work demonstrates a committed consideration of the practice of surveillance and an artistic approach to the task of archiving media. End of the Message- Total Archives (14 min) documents the project and is a hybrid of documentary film, video art and artist’s documentation. End of the Message [archives live!] (60 minutes) is a three-channel video installation, redesigned for presentation on DVD as an interactive multi-screen work.

more info: https://darkofritz.net/projects/end/endopen.html

Camera surveillance gives rise to many questions: how are people’s movements perceived by the watchers? How do their behaviour changes when they feel observed? What kind of archive is created with these recordings? This dvd, a summa of the five-years-long project ‘End of theMessage’, by Darko Fritz, contains videos that cross these open questions using the omnicomprehensive ductility of the convex 360 degrees lens used in his installations. The synthesis of the informations, such as in the fast-forwarded parts, or the extrapolated fragments of ‘portraits’, or the editing made by the watchers themselves, twists the usual relationship of reciprocal defense between watcher and watched, formalizing new languages to interpret surveillance images. Published under a Creative Commons license, this ‘end of the message’ opens new ways to interpret the daily relation with the semi-automatic eye and its (distorted and spectacular) vision of reality.
-Neural.it

DVD, dual layer
3 hours, 13 minutes, 4:3, colour, stereo, region-free PAL