Johannes Binotto Metaleptic Attack

Metaleptic Attack is one of the many examples of how Johannes Binotto pushes the usual boundaries of the video essay format, paving the way for a critique that explores haptic visuality. He invites the viewer to engage using not only their eyes and ears, yet also breaks the boundaries of visual media, allowing them to utilize new expressive means.

Taking a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds, one of the most famous films in cinema history, Binotto subjected it to critical deformations reminiscent of Nam June Paik’s television experiments in which the image was distorted by magnets. The Hitchcock footage is hard to recognize In the visual flow of Metaleptic Attack, a mishmash of contrasting colors and aggressive interference burns out the screen and attacks not only the observer’s vision but also seems to affect them tactilely. The video itself is attacked to the same extent: not only its inhabitants—children running away from a flock of birds—but also the picture as such, which ceases to be itself, cracking and exploding with glitches. This intense situation testifies to the possibility of a different relationship between the viewer and the moving image and, most importantly, allows us to redefine the sensory and conceptual boundaries within which we are used to perceiving films, video essays, and other audiovisual artifacts.

The materiality of the work is further reinforced by one circumstance. A few seconds before the finale, the video essayist displays a small explanatory caption on the screen, which works almost like a plot twist, forcing us to rethink what we have just seen: "No plug-ins or digital effects were used in the creation of the image, just a closed electrical circuit."