Gabriel Esteban Molina

Disinhibiting Stimulus, 2020

Live Studio Session on May 5, 2020 at 6:30 PM (MST)

Disinhibiting Stimulus reflects my struggle to focus on what matters and about controlling the attention of the viewer. This work is from my time in Iceland where I went to explore ideas of isolation, technology, and social media. During this trip I felt like I was at the mercy of my art practice - I felt a lot of pressure to be making lots of work, and posting on social media. Even though I was supposed to be on an artist residency to make new work, I found myself more interested in simply experiencing things for myself in the moment instead of frantically trying and failing to document an experience and then not even being able to remember it later on because I was too busy messing around with the camera (which still happened often). Though I tried my best to record these experiences using my phone and camera, I knew that they could never compare to the actual experience I was having and the feeling of being present. This essential experience was only for me. The viewers will get images and sounds, but they'll never know how I felt then.

This work came about as a spur of the moment idea when I was shooting the water down at the beach in Ísafjörður. The camera I was using doesn't have a microphone so it records video without sound - as I was shooting the water it occurred to me to record the sound of the waves with my phone. When I opened the app I put the phone down on a rock and I immediately loved the aesthetic of the clean white background with red line and numbers against the backdrop of volcanic rocks and the beach. The minimalism of it was very appealing but more importantly, in terms of actually visually representing the sound, it seemed almost symbolic especially as the visual depiction of sound manifests as a single red wave. I tried to keep shooting the waves at the beach but I was so into the look of the phone that I decided to record just the phone in a still shot framing it so that the waves might break into view every once in a while. This was a sort of rebellion against myself and the viewer by not showing them what they want to see. By framing the video so that the recorded subject was withheld from the viewer created a sensation of missing out, the viewer feels as though they are not getting the full picture, only the sound that was recorded. There is an idea of imperfection- the inevitable failure to communicate the holistic nature of experience, and despite that I am compelled to try and communicate something. I’ve always been interested in that paradox - it’s even built into the English language, as "screen" is is an example of an auto-antonym. It means both to show and to hide.

I couldn't foresee that my work would be even more relevant in the time of the pandemic but all of these themes are hyper-relevant now that many people's only contact with the outside world will come from a screen, and that we could be dealing with social distancing and enforced isolation for years potentially. I've been very isolated at times in the last few years but my practice allowed me to express how distant I felt from the world and also how I longed for it. Technology and communication makes this situation much more bearable for those who have access to it, and even though my work has a lot of romanticism in it, it’s also meant to be critical of our dependence on technology. We're now finding ourselves completely reliant on it and the world is following suit and making everything virtual.