videogame by vipin viuay

video game of record and memory

Nobody will survive for eternity here
It is a matter of few days ahead and after'
sings the itinerant bard in Vipin Vijay's Videogame. But this video journey is not just about transience of things and life; it is also about survival, adaptation, transfomation and transmogrification of images, objects and memories which are nothing but different states of being. While the film journeys in a dilapidated jalopy, trundling its way out of the labyrinth of Kolkata city and into the open of the rural verdant green spaces, what unfolds is the the drama of the interface between times, technologies, ways of living, and also acts of remembering, recording and memorising. So objects and images from the past and present jostle here in this video game of memory and record.

While the bards sing the above song as if to propitiate the jalopy's soul, women walk along with polyester nets, while dish antennae perch upon old buildings. The digitised petrol pump is juxtaposed with the old obsolete one lying in disuse yet adamantly in place. The jalopy itself is juxtaposed with the rusting remains of older ones, having had their run, now re/usting in desolation. The film footages of the ruins of an old temple shot years ago film and which were not used, and bearing the editing smudges and marks, jostle with their video images, one image graven upon stone, the others upon the tricky surface of the celluloid and pixels. While these images carved upon stone lie desolate in the wilderness, these 'NG' shots have been swept away from the editing table long long ago. Yet, both persist in time and space and so, memory; and become the very stuff of this memory-game.



The self reflexive voice-over ponders upon the inert recording equipment called camera and the nature of the images, about how they turn from their physical frontality into metaphors and ruminates upon the technologies of recording and also memorising.

It is a constant and compulsive slippage, from one image to another, from image to memory, from image to sound and music, from image to metaphors, from the image of reality to the reality of image, from real objects to video and film and digital images etc This incessant slippage is a journey that parodies our contemporary life-experience of visual mediation and inundation