Manu Luksch (London): ‘Moonwalking in Real Time’

The presentation “Moonwalking in RealTime” will draw from the research for sci-fi docu FACELESS, an experimental film made using preexisting surveillance cameras installed around London. It discusses the derivation of the film’s scenario from the legal and material properties of the constituent images and summarizes the project’s critical position by focusing on a key element of the narrative setting – the system of ‘RealTime’.

FACELESS treats CCTV images as an example of ‘legal readymades’: they were obtained under the UK Data Protection Act 1998, and under Human Rights legislation, to protect the privacy of third parties ,the faces of other people in the images were erased by the CCTV operators. The film, an overt hommage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée, interprets the faceless world as a society under the reformed ‘Real-Time’ Calendar, without history nor future. What is promised instead is the perfection of each moment, devoid of temporal depth in which emotion can develop. Faceless comprises documentary footage rearranged to construct a fiction that continually points back to the real world.