46Bis, rue de Belleville

Long exposure work, frame by frame, in the streets of Prague. "East" atmosphere of confinement and self-censorship, foreboding and deleterious.

These experiments for Baes’s stop motion film ‘46 bis, rue de Belleville’ are an art work in its own right. The stop motion technique he uses belongs to the realm of animation. He never handles the camera in an obvious way, but shoots frame per frame in order to come up with a dreamlike staccato effect. With ‘Test’ Pascal Baes sets up his trademark: a low-tech edition of the time-lapse photography, applied to choreography.

Mathematical re-composition of fragments of old 16mm films through a heightfield effect. Images have been digitally enhanced, and blacks and whites have been boosted. The end result is 3D images which create an explosion of light and colour.

A 16mm time-lapse of Tokyo gives way to footage of amphibious and crustacean goings-on. Soundtrack by DJ Pangeol.

Experiments with optical microscope x4.

Pascal Baes experiments with the reflecting feedback of a video projector in a meticulous interaction with a performance by his life companion Aï Suzuki. In post-processing, the images were digitally edited, which results in an expressionist, abstract study of the human body. With the help of various effects, Baes radically intervenes on the images, mutating shapes, penetrating textures and reconstructing his visual experiment into a psychedelic phantasm of the ‘corpus humanis’ and distorted sensuality. Demographical lines fuse together with shreds of human body and facial traits in a restless outburst of colour, lighting and movement, expanding in interaction with an electronic composition of sliding and lashing sounds into a claustrophobic experience.