#Z

It crackles, it hisses, it dazzles the viewer. While ”it” is a short music video with the simple title #Z, ”it” also denotes the obvious reference to the imagination’s power (or compulsion) to form an image of the noise and light’s origin. #Z is sustained by this tension between its existence as a product and the source of something else in the same way as all information conveyed through audio-visual media. The fundamental difference in this case is that no answer is supplied to the question of what ”it” in fact is.

Which is the point: ”We fall back on the mirror myth of recognition when we look at a given object or read a set text” (Louis Althusser). This statement is especially relevant for audio-visual media, which is why Serge Daney supplemented it with the remark that ”it would be naive to assume that film will be able to destroy this myth at some point.” In other words, it is a question of ideology, in this case that of visibility, which #Z deconstructs in two different ways: firstly because the video consistently hovers on the threshold between visibility and recognition, and secondly because the visual level is taken up by unequivocal elements to such an extent that it is no longer able to serve as a comforting image (or myth) for the affective power of the musical soundtrack. But whenever superficial evidence is removed, the unavoidable result is greater latitude for the transitive nature of meaning. (Vrääth Öhner)