MAKING BEAST APPEAR, one of the advantages to typing on a computer, wrote Chris Marker to Sana na N’Hada on a note processed with the newly introduced ZX81 home computer in the early eighties. Marker proceeds with other reflections on media formats — the innovative 2-3 hour long recordable VHS tape that made it possible to pirate any film from Marker’s extensive videotheque to the film institute’s collection growing in Bissau. The small aluminum coated 10 cm wide black paper note ends with at least five signatures: CHRIS., Chris Marker’s handwritten violet autograph, a pixelated cat pictogram, perhaps Guillaume, and the zx printer itself. Indeed, other creatures appear to have authored the erosion of the material and more are joining in. Marker’s notes on mediums and the various possibilities for technical reproduction hint about how data activation and transfer can always allow new and old entities to evolve, manifest and inscribe. For this archival presentation, Zé Interpretador interprets this note in his binary code weaves and once more honors the entangled threads of cine-kinship and its never unequivocal transmissions.
Faire Apparaître des Bêtes is a collaboration between Sana na N’Hada, Filipa César and Zé Interpretador with Chris Marker et al a joint production by Mediateca Onshore and Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art presented at the exhibition How to find meaning in dead time.