Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, 1998
Single-channel video projection 17’ 30’’, colour, sound Photo: Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Galería Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid
Sergio Prego’s video references the 1989 science fiction film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, whose title character is a cult figure in Japanese fantasy cinema. In this work, Prego stages himself as a kind of decadent superhero flying
over the environs of Bilbao. Bound to Fail marks the beginning of a body of work wherein which the artist makes use of a system that captures a single moment simultaneously from several viewpoints. The fragmented perception that results from this system is then rebuilt, using techniques that approach traditional craft methods, to create a new perspective that upsets the usual relations between space and time, between the body and its surroundings. For Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, the artist arranged 40 cameras in a circle around him and recorded various actions which he performed. When the resulting footage was edited to show one shot after the other, situations that otherwise would hardly be recognizable became visible. Another important layer is the way Prego approaches sound, relating electronic music to a way of understanding the body inside space and how the perception of time is determined by our physical ability to move inside space.
