Wildfire

Directed by David Claerbout

Biological programming, still existent in today’s living beings, prompts a reflex to stay away from fire if it cannot be contained, such as in the case of a wildfire. A ‘meditation on fire’ may therefore sound like a contradiction. Inspired by the inquiry in the amount of power needed to produce a digital “still life” of fire, a task likely to set the computer system on fire, Wildfire confronts the biological and the digital. Prolonged shots of silenced fire comply with the notion of biological breathing time, while the abstract nature of the burning fire serves as a metaphor for the technological abstraction linked to its making, hinting at the increasingly abstract world we live in. In Wildfire (meditation of fire) the camera has been removed and disintegrated into a numerical system of binary codes. We are confronted with an illusion of an image, a hallucination, a visual construct of computing. These images offer an immersive experience of the otherwise un-experienceable.