First and foremost, Blinks 1997 is explicitly an homage to, a re-reading
of, Vito Acconci's Blinks 1969. Moreover, Blinks 1997 is an homage to a
specific way of understanding the artistic work, and an acknowledgement
of the critical and artistic possibilities an intentionally amateur use
of any new technology for capturing, registering, manipulating and
disseminating images offers.

If we bear this in mind, then certain secondary allusions lose their
importance, such as Blinks' reference to the term "html" as having a
precise letter style in the design world, which in the title is used as
a self-referential gesture; or the allusion to the prematurely deceased
Blinky (Palermo, of course) with his even more recondite split-second
blink.

They are also of little importance compared to the programme of using a
technology - and Acconci's use of another, almost 30 years ago, to
foreground the primordial nature of conscious activity that processes
artistic work. Also, that this project explores a potential approach to
the event, as opposed to the limitations that a specific
representational order imposes on the possibility of experiencing it,
means that the revolutionary value of the piece (which really
reconstructs that which Acconci's work already had, and right in the
same place) resides in this operation, with its double status of
ontological and experiential gnosis. Put another way: its political
value is that it points to the potential for producing representation in
another way. That is precisely the task of art - it is the compromising
position that this piece adopts.

We would like to highlight one crucial aspect : in Acconci's original
Blinks, this capturing of the event was specifically linked to the
sequential passage of the present, to a process of development, to the
'real' progress of a subject on a street. The effort not to blink was
supposed to make one aware of this development, and the unintentional
(unwilling, even) capture of images coincided with the moments of
weakness of the mental effort. 'Real' time, so to speak, was written in
the capture of images by the combination of two stipulated machines (the
walking machine and the machine for obtaining images) in which the
subject did not intervene (an 'unconscious lens' was working, a
non-subject functioning as a mechanical device for experimental
production and registering of the experience).

For us, the problem with Blinks 1969 was in its presentation, in its
exhibition before the spectator, since the spatial arrangement of the 12
photographs sharing a single spatial-temporal plane took away the sense
of sequence. Without the logical reading order that 'obliged' one to
read them in the 'right' order, the development of the event (which,
precisely, was what the piece best 'said') was lost in the order of
representation. The arrest of a now-time in permanent displacement -
that was just what the exhibition's spatial arrangement of the 12
photographs lost sight of, preventing the spectator from grasping the
metaphysical-political strength of the piece.

In some ways, that is what our piece, a modified reconstruction, is
trying to restore. Here, the form of exhibition, of presentation of the
piece in the public arena, recovers the sequentiality - exploiting the
exhibition possibilities now offered by a new technology that is
likewise used with the same political assumptions of intended amateurism
- and if the spectator is exacting and carries out the instructions
contained within the piece, (s)he will be exposed to a struggle of
conscience and will that may offer possibilities similar to those which
faced the executor of the walk in the original piece (such that it will
again be a kind of restored unconscious lens which determines the time
and space of its virtual passage, and which operates in the very act of
reception).

Added to this is a feature which immediately caught our attention on
first seeing the piece: the potential for constructing an hypothetically
exact reversal of the time of capture. Let's imagine a spectator whose
willpower not to blink and whose physiological conditions fully coincide
with those of the Acconcian passer-by: his stroll through the 12 images
(disregarding the time taken for each image to go down) would have been
carried out in an exactly equal 'real time', but inverted. The time of
exposure, of reception, would have coincided in the negative, nearly
thirty years on, with the original journey of a photographer passer-by.
We can aiso imagine that if they walk at the same pace and shoot at the
same time, they have covered the same metres in space. The spaces have
very different characters - in one case it is a street, in the other
they are virtual 'units of navigation'. But let's not be fooled: neither
one is wholly real or imaginary. Instead it is the composition of both
registers that inevitably penetrates all which we experience.

Maybe this is what we meant to accomplish. But maybe it is something
else, quite different, that one will see in Blinks 97. That peculiar
content, fortuitous and indeterminate, is as valid or more valid than
what our own reading proposes, and one hopes the piece is of genuine
interest beyond that which this introduction has suggested.

Let's hope that it is, for each spectator who travels through it. This
piece is a street, and like life, it is passed through in the blink of
an eye - in ictu oculi (which, in reality, is secretly the true title of
the piece). Probably.

La Societe Anonyme