Diamond is a fragment, in video-tape form, of an installation produced by the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985. The installation takes the form of a set of ten or so videograms, some enclosed in black boxes two or three meters high, rather like skyscrapers with video windows, symbols of television as an organic part of the contemporary architectural space. Other audio and visual spheres invite spectators to move around. refusing the constraint of the monitor, Tony Oursler hides it in constructions to accentuate the impact of the projection. With Sphères d'influence, he works to remove the passive, hypnotic aspect of the video screen, a preoccupation which led him in the 90s to stage video projections on models.

In the video tape, cardboard and plasticine figurines interact within painted scenes which are miniature theatrical decors. Tony Oursler's universe is dream-like and parodic. he tells stories involving murder, sex and mystery in playlets shot from a single camera angle. The contemporary imaginative landscape portrayed by this dark tale is clearly influenced by the growing appearance of new technologies in daily life. This interest, which gnaws at the thinking of his characters, is counterbalanced by the absence of special effects apart from very obvious tricks, such as an actor's face or a mouth appearing in an opening in the decor, instead of the customary inserts. The story explodes into a multitude of discontinuities, in which different voices put across dualistic thinking. In this telecommunication society, speech is being lost through an excess of information. The writing of the work evolves through shifts in meaning and associations of ideas, ranging from the register of the popular press to small ads, and from astrology to advertising, producing an urban poetic framework.

The story begins in the Place Clichy, like a sort of psychedelic novel. "C'est samedi soir, la ville est grande ouverte, une ville de désir" (It's Saturday night and the city is wide open, a city of desire), says the voiceover. The protagonist wants to "vivre sa vie en une nuit entière" (live his life in a whole night) [1]. he starts by being run over in the road. There then follows a lethal scene in which the suspect declares that the victims killed one another during their struggle. A head wanders around in the middle of a couple covered in blood. One of the voices which runs through the tape continues threnody: "C'est ici que j'ai appris à comprendre toutes les chansons d'amour... Face à la perte d'un être aimé, l'on peut commencer à comprendre, pour comble de la misère, les subtilités pulsatives de la musique pop, chaque cliché se déploie comme une fleur s'épanouit dans la pisse des limites humaines, rompues... ces petits poèmes atteignent immédiatement le noyau de mon âme, rimes après rimes simples, s'accordent parfaitement ensemble dans une structure sonique... jeunesse sonique perpétuelle..." (This is where I learnt to understand all love songs... When you lose a loved one, you can begin to understand, as the depths of misery, the pulsating subtleties of pop music, each cliché unfurls like a flower blooming in the piss of broken human limits... these little poems immediately reach into the core of my soul, rhyme after simple rhyme, perfectly attuned in a sonic structure... a perpetual sonic youth...). The character continues his multiple peregrinations. "Toutes les femmes qu'il avait vues à la télévision sont, d'une façon ou d'une autre, devenues ses amantes. Pour lui, c'était clair, leur présence avait traversé son âme même, et là, il les possédait. Ici, au service des petites annonces vidéo, il lui faut choisir une partenaire de reproduction." (All the women that he'd seen on the television became, in one way or another, his lovers. For him, it was clear, their presence had run right through his soul itself, and there, he possessed them. Here, in the video smads department, he had to choose a partner for reproduction.) The hero, in a sort of journey of initiation which turns into a disaster, tries to achieve personal fulfillment and all he manages to do is cut up his personality. We learn that violence and multiple aggressions lead to separation of the body and the soul. The narrator becomes impassioned about the idea of reconstructing a perfect order "à partir des spasmes violents du chaos émotionnel où cette vision de la symétrie divine touche au divin, toutes ces tortures deviennent supportables quand on peut voir la lumière..." (from the violent spasms of the emotional chaos in which this vision of divine symmetry achieves divinity, all these tortures become bearable when you can see the light...) And the luminosity is crystallized here through the diamond, that beautiful refractor of light; a link between present and future, simultaneously a romantic object and an object used by thieves. The work ends with a TV show in which we watch various volunteers' mental representations during orgasm; live, to judge which are the most amusing. "Les gens feraient n'importe quoi pour transcender l'ennui de la vie quotidienne." (People would do anything to transcend the dullness of everyday life).

Sphères d'influence (Diamond) is a thirty-minute tape in which we witness the transcription of "un baptême chimique, violé par un bataillon d'émotions" (a chemical baptism violated by a battalion of emotions).

Dominique Garrigues

[1] All the quotes in inverted commas are taken from the video tape.