The Doppelganger Effect: Mark Boulos at Abandon Normal Devices

If anyone were able to enter an art gallery and have an out-of-body experience inspired by the work, then surely the art world would be brought to a shuddering conclusion, or at least a re-reckoning: we’d quickly become concerned solely with the possibility of drifting from our earthly husks to the precipice of afterlife. But Swiss-American artist Mark Boulos’ aim to invoke such a reaction in his latest immersive film, Echo – a co-commission between Forma Arts and Media and Liverpool's FACT, and showing as part of the city's Abandon Normal Devices festival this month – is, of course, open to interpretation.

Working with Swiss neuroscientist Prof Olaf Blanke, a pioneer in the exploration of out-of-body experiences, Boulos has drawn on his collaborator’s laboratory studies to stretch the boundaries of filmmaking and the gallery experience. Coupling analysis of the human brain with Hitchcock’s perception-altering camera techniques and principles of Victorian theatrical illusion, Echo creates an intentionally unsettling experience as perspectives are distorted and reality becomes less certain. But Boulos tempers expectations of an out-of-body experience, saying it doesn’t necessarily mean people will be forced to decide whether or not to walk into the light.

“I can’t replicate the kind of hallucinatory, out-of-body experience that people suffering a stroke and those who have had a near-death experience have described,” he explains. “But the kind of apparatus that Blanke is using with video disturbs the orientation of perception to create a feeling of disembodiment and dislocation. Olaf is trying to do a similar thing to me, to create a disturbance in the unity of our sense of perception and understanding of body, but he is trying to do it in a neurological lab and I am trying to do it in a gallery.”

Since his 2008 film All that Is Solid Melts into Air, a two-screen installation tying together two sides of the global battle for oil, its title drawn from The Communist Manifesto, Boulos has been building a reputation for uncompromising film work that surrounds the viewer. (That film is one of three previous works also showing at FACT, including No Permanent Address, Boulos' 2010 three-screen feature that saw him capture the movements of a communist Philippine guerrilla group decried internationally as terrorists, and The Origin of the World (2009), which has Boulos’ image reflected in his own iris in a moment of self-analysis.) Echo, though, is being billed as a significant turning point in Boulos’s practice. Filmed in the financial district of London, it makes the viewer the character of the piece, relaying their own image and voice back in real-time as the backdrop drifts away and morphs around them. The person facing the screen is transposed and their image adjusted in the projection using 'Pepper’s ghost', a 19th-century illusion technique that creates ghostly apparitions. By having no words and no documentary footage, it’s a piece that Boulos, evidently a keen self-critic, feels resolves some of his misgivings concerning his previous output.

“One problem with my previous work is that it is not obviously expressive,” he says. “How is it an expression of my ideas or imagination or of myself in any way? This new work is addressing that issue as it’s something of a self-portrait, although the self is subtracted as it’s only a self-portrait if I am standing there. The previous works were so discursive, so about the narrative; I wanted to create something that was wordless and much more formal.

“I feel one of the great pleasures of the work, without sounding arrogant, is to face you with your own image,” he continues. “I think video and cinema often begs identification from the viewer; they ask them to identify with the hero of the movie, to suggest that they in some way represent something of you. But I actually wanted to do that, to place the viewer in the movie as they are actually watching it.”

That Echo is a wordless departure doesn’t mean that Boulos’s worldview, so strongly evident in previous works, is completely lost. In All that Is Solid Melts into Air, the suited traders of the colossal futures trading centre, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, are contrasted against the guerrillas of the Niger Delta who are locked in a battle for the rights to the oil that is sold from under them. They invoke their native spirits to make them bulletproof in their battles, perhaps a ludicrous notion to Western ears, but Boulos laughs when he recalls that “the beliefs of the traders in the film actually seemed more metaphysical, more abstract and less understandable or material than those of the guerrilla fighters.” In Echo, the choice of the City of London as the street scene retains and promotes the idea that financial systems operate far away from the understanding of those they affect – a continuation of a personal agenda that permeates Boulos's practice. “The architecture seems to shrink away from you in the film,” he explains. “It’s an almost physical alienation of how we are socially or economically alienated by the financial system and its machinery and architectures.”

Though the films draw on current affairs, the artist is at pains to point out that they seek no journalistic credit or appraisal. Rather, they are artworks that explore significantly more than the narrative that we are presented with, and at their heart is an interest in phenomenology: notions of subjectivity and consciousness that raise more questions about the validity of the recorded image and what we perceive to be real than about the subject itself.

“In both All that Is Solid Melts into Air and No Permanent Address, there is a sense of questioning what is seen and what is believed and an equation of documentary with fact,” Boulos says. “I think that just because we see something or because the camera records something, it doesn’t mean that it exists irrefutably and outside of our own subjective experience. Echo is trying to undermine the assumption of objectivity of a photographic or a documentary image by breaking it apart and putting you at the centre of it.”

That Boulos’ moment of change comes as part of Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is appropriate given the event’s focus on experimentation with the inauguration of the new AND Fair, which takes vintage World’s Fairs as its inspiration, and four 'ateliers', which offer artists the space and time to explore new elements of their practice. The ateliers include Marshmallow Laser Feast, a collaborative blend of artists Memo Akten, Robin McNicholas and Barney Steel who will work to connect cinemas across the country in a networked transmission of animation and special effects (the residency itself is closed, but concludes with a public showcase). Other highlights include SEFT-1, a road- and rail-ready vehicle devised by Mexican artists Iván Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene to explore their home country’s forgotten outposts, overlooked as political and commercial interests passed them by. It will appear in Ropewalks Square after a month-long experiment in Blackburn to make the craft amphibious – proving that if progressive artists have a wild idea, AND is the place to try to float it.