Vertigo@home
Seconde version HD réalisée en 2015 pour l’exposition Walkers.
In Vertigo (1958), a man in a car follows a woman who is looking for an inexistant past. Using Google Streetview, the artist found back the filming sites of the movie. He was thus able to reproduce with precision the caracters course in San Francisco. He filmed Vertigo for a second time but stayed home to do it.
Christine Sprengler, Hitchcock and Contemporary Art, 2014 :
Vertigo’s soundtrack—this time unaltered and complete with sound effeCts—also provides continuity to Gregory Chatonsky’s Vertigo@home. Over the course of approximately nine minutes, this virtual cinephilic pilgrimage leads us through Scottie’s San Francisco, folowing his route and visiting the very same sites he did in the ?lm. However, Chatonsky neither ?lmed the journey itself, nor were any
sequences appropriated from Hitchcock‘s original. As the title indicates, Vertig?lwmt was created by Chatonsky at home, a feat made possible by the use of Google Streetview. A function of Google Maps, Streetview offers navigators a car’s—eye view of the roads they plan to travel, offering a fairly clear picture of structures, landmarks, and, as privacy advocates have lamented, people in compromising situations.
Chatonsky matches his route to Scottie’s as closely as possible, “editing” as Hitchcock did, in order to sync the soundtrack with the action (i.e., pace of travel). When Scotn’e goes indoors, the screen turns black and our only stimuli are sound effects such as Scottie’s footsteps and a car door slamming. At these moments, the work of the Foley artist becomes most apparent. We become aware of the occasional and uncharacteristic minimalism of Vtrn’ga’s soundtrack and the function of its erasure of ambient sound. The sound effects are isolated from their attendant images and from the fullness of the score that typically subsumes these sounds. In this instance, we hear only the sounds Scottie makes, suggesting all his energy is being marshaled into looking and thus signifying the interiority of his state of mind during this pursuit.
Chatonsky’s use of appropriated sound here also raises another set of interesting issues with respect to fact and ?ction, the real and the virtual. Speci?cally, it encourages us to think about ?ction and arti?ce in relation to sound, something we may be unaccustomed to doing. We might readily assess the veracity of the image when confronted with visual effects while watching a ?lm, but rarely do we subject sound to such scrutiny. In Vertigo@home though, such an exercise is seemingly encouraged. Although Google Streetview offers us a virtual tour of San Francisco, its images are read as real. They are outside the domain of ?ction and as part of a mapmaking endeavor must, by de?nition and necessity, re?ect real physical space, real geography. This is not to say that these images are not mediated by their technology or aesthetic markers, something we will address in just a moment, but that all things point to Chatonsky’s images as unmistakably “real.”