DEAD RINGER
HD video, 3D animation,
with sound, 22:20 min.
2023
DEAD RINGER begins in the period when the French socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui was imprisoned at Fort du Taureau in Bretagne. In 1871, at the same time as the barricades were built on the streets of Paris during the Paris Commune, Blanqui were in his prison cell writing the book L’éternité par les astres (Eternity by the Stars). An astronomical hypothesis on the copy written through the language of technology, dominated by the photographic possibility of reproduction and recurrence, where words like copy, stereotype and cliché dominated the understanding of Blanqui's cosmos. Through the recently made scientific discovery of the basic elements through spectral analysis, a method of seeing different fractions of light in material, he built a theory on the idea of a limited amount of basic materials, and at the same time unlimited time and space. The consequence of this idea becomes a world where everything is repeating eternally, where everything that is, has already been. Through the eternity of space and time he saw a cosmic drama without beginning and end, where it is only the fortunate bifurcation that can make us move forward. At the same time, in Paris, the communards staged the revolution in front of the camera, posing at the barricades, through the technological medium that until then had not been available outside of the bourgeoisie, in a moment where many citizens met the lens for the first time. Tempted to create the image of the successful revolution, they saw new possibilities in the camera's way of capturing time, a will that eventually led to unforeseen consequences.
© Joel Danielsson & Louise Öhman