A sensitive reflection on the notion of beginning. Perhaps a new time, perhaps a different color in intimacy and naivety, or in the sweetness of the first shared moments. We speak of a well-intentioned adventure that is closely linked to the complex mechanisms of an ever-too-volatile present: low resolution versus high dissolution. Strange, deaf, and mysterious statements in high dissolution. Intimate and sincere confessions in low resolution. The intimate experience and its subsequent perception in the interface, the subjectivity of the artificial experience, or the ever-attentive dream of the artifact.

Two pieces distant in time are proposed. On one hand, “It Wasn’t Love” by the renowned author Sadie Benning, recorded with the low-resolution Pixelvision camera in the early nineties. On the other hand, *Piosenka z początków* (Song of the First Days) by the author Lora Tensorska, made with anonymous high-dissolution materials. Both pieces, separated by two decades, are born in distant moments of deep transition when the dream of a new time becomes the common link.

It Wasn’t Love

Sadie Benning, 20 m, 1992

Benning illustrates a lascivious encounter with a “bad girl,” through the staging of gender and the interaction of Hollywood clichés: posing for the camera as the rebel, the platinum blonde, the gangster, the fifties crooner, and the “vamp” with heavy eyes. Poses with a cigarette, slow romantic dances, and fast-action heavy metal street shots drive the viewer through the story of the love affair. Benning’s video goes beyond romantic fantasy, describing other facets of physical attraction including fear, violence, lust, guilt, and total excitement. As she herself says, “It wasn’t love, but it was something…” It was an opportunity to feel glamorous, sexy, and famous, all at the same time.

Piosenka z początków (Song of the First Days)

Lora Tensorska, 15 m, 2022

Human, urban, and natural landscape where people, atmospheres, and things seem lost in the adventure of delocalized moments. Interpretations, costumes, combat uniforms. Postures and appearances, beginnings and endings. Beginnings within unstable environments, enthusiasms, and sincere visions. Unrealities, doubts, uncertainties. In the journey through a collection of photographic portraits, a flying and practical transit is proposed, sensibly dreamlike, considering an uncertain and therefore agile and flexible beginning.

SONG OF THE FIRST DAYS is part of Illusion of Movement

“Illusion of Movement” is the thematic continuation of the last module of the Observatory in “Video Tuesday 2023”, titled “Intimacy vs Media”. It was originally developed during the early days of the Unidentified Video Observatory in the nineties. It collected various considerations about contradictions, inertia, continuities, and tensions of personal experience in the contemporary media flow.

“Illusion of Movement” presents a series of publications at Desorg dot Org and essayistic video sessions at Santa Monica during the entirety of the “Video Tuesday 2024” cycle. It explores the ephemeral and illusory nature of moving images, as well as their connection with intimate experience through the dictate of mass media. It includes reflections on the sense of authorship in contemporaneity, the recovery of forgotten memories, or optical and sensory fantasies in high-speed media environments, where the technified image acts as a distorted mirror. It is about the indefinable space between frames, where time blurs between the speed of the medium and the intimacy of personal experience, and the distance between both is reduced in a complex and labyrinthine set of often too opaque mechanisms. The illusory fact is crucial now, when the distinction between real movement and simulation is complex.

**Introduction, projection-audition, conversation.**