Sergio Prego
Tetsuo Bound to Fail stands out as milestone in videographic creation in Spain in the late 1990s. The starting-point for the work is the fragmented capture of various actions performed by the artist using a battery of forty cameras arranged in a circle around him. These actions are then rebuilt and shown one after the other, resulting in a cinema-like circular travelling shot. The movement achieved with this effect, and the static quality of the frozen image (upsetting the traditional cinema concept in which a stationary camera records an action as it develops in real time), thrust the viewer into a universe in which the laws of physics are altered. Using a similar system, the action of jumping repeatedly is recorded and then edited to create an effect of levitation. The reference to science fiction is made explicit in the title -Tetsuo is a cult figure in Japanese fantasy cinema - and the artist becomes a kind of decadent super-hero flying over the environs of Bilbao. Prego fashions a visual discourse that distorts the time-and-space limits of the representation, generating a fresh reading of a wide range of visual procedures to achieve a common result going well beyond the limitations imposed by artistic disciplines in themselves.
