Infinite Cinema: At The International Film Festival Rotterdam

Philippe Parreno | The Quietus | By Robert Barry

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Nobody does 3D quite like Philippe Parreno. The French artist’s No More Reality Whereaboutsopens with the close-up face of Ann Lee, the anime character bought by Parreno and his compatriot Pierre Huyghe back in 1999. She self-referentially explains to us her own back-story (“I was bought for ¥46,000, paid to a design character company, K-Works…”), but, wearing 3D glasses, we see her face glitch and distort. Where a James Cameron or Joseph Kosinski might use the polarised glasses to more fully immerse their audience into their respective film worlds, to create a fuller, more lifelike cinematic experience; Parreno does exactly the reverse, using the stereoscope effect to jar and disturb, a high-tech verfremdungseffekt which feels like it is fucking directly with the cortical pathways between the eye and the brain.

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