Abyme-image

Abyme-image (2016) is a video installation built from footage recorded at a flea market in Poznań. The original video is first played on a mobile phone and recorded from its screen. That recording is then replayed on a television, filmed again, and transferred to a computer monitor. The process continues across several cycles, with each new playback recorded and displayed on another screen.

With each generation, the image appears within the frame of another screen, producing a regression of nested images. As the frames of phones, televisions, and monitors accumulate, the flea-market footage becomes increasingly distorted, losing clarity while gaining noise, glare, and other visual artifacts. Changes in scale, resolution, color, and texture become part of the image itself.

Drawing on the visual logic of mise en abyme, the work presents the moving image as something repeatedly mediated, copied, and transformed by the devices through which it passes. Rather than functioning as a transparent view of the flea market, the video becomes a record of its own technological reproduction. Through this process, Abyme-image shifts attention from the scene being represented to the material surfaces, apparatuses, and distortions that shape how it is seen.

© Maryam Muliaee, 2016