Diego

Diego at Objekt animace. Třetí smysl (Object Animation. Third Sense), Zlin, 2009. Photo by Filip Cenek

1'24


Manipulated video and sound excerpt from the soccer match by Argentina versus England at FIFA 1986.

Watch video here.


Marshall McLuhan used to say that "the medium is the message". However, we are way beyond that today. Privileging form over content or vice versa belongs to the debates long time dead now. It is possible they just expressed certain atavism of the age old dualisms dating back to Plato. And as much as modern philosophy resolved the mind/body problem by declaring their inseparable unity and the same time their intelligible discernibility, this is also the case with form and content in communication and art.

With the artwork like Diego by Martin Kohout it is plainly impossible to speak about form and content separately and irreducibly. Diego implodes both viewing points into genuine Moebius strip one can traverse infinitely without telling one side from the other. After a while, or maybe not even in the first loop, a viewer can notice the ball in the video shares a vertical line with the video slider. The frame and the picture are bridged over within a temporal allegory unlocking in a profoundly simple and illuminating way the relationship of message and its means suggesting the former always already bears the seed of latter.

Text by Palo Fabuš, 2010.