Bériou's hands and some reimported Polaroids are telling possibly his biography. However, maybe it is only a comical time-lapsed story in a maze-like setting.

The project "Ex Memoriam" is essentially based on techniques of digitizing analog images, and explores various ways of manipulating these images.

It is a question of "re-importing" techniques which were developed in 3D software into a 2D universe. In this sense we are trying to perfect a "graphic palette" which would have both the versatility and the combinatory power of 3D software.

We think that these techniques are destined to revolutionize the design and ergonomics of 2D tools. In order to realize "Ex Memoriam", we have had to develop or refine the following techniques from the 3D Synthetic Video software:
- superimposing polygonal structures on 2D digitized image data files (of bands, faces, etc.);
- connecting polygonal structures together and retouching the 2D images;
- animation of polygonal structures by manipulating them with the polygon editor (much more flexible than traditional graphic palette techniques) and using automatic point interpolation systems (animation of the bands);
- combined polygonl texture interpolations through the production of topological shapes; presently called 'morphing'(animation of faces);
- superimposing various polygonal layers in the z-dimension (which amounts to the same as numerical calculation but is far more effective).

We think that in the long term we will combine the various techniques for the manipulation and animation of digitized images into a new, homogeneous software. All the Foundations are there, only the software is unfortunately divided between 2D and 3D.

The viewer's first impression will doubtless be the incongruity, or to put it abetter way, the comic aspects of this labyrinth of changing, overlaid and intertwined hands. The piling up of these heterogeneous flesh-tones should amplify this feeling of strangeness, or a story without a point. It is particularly this formal level whicb contains the film's deeper meaning andreference to its subject, memory.

Today's gene manipulation, the combined potential of computer science, the information labyrinth, ... the picture, half-true, half synthetic, is a good aesthetic interpretation of these contemporary issues. The manipulation we expect from our computers corresponds to the manipulation which the power of our imagination has always brought about in the individual and collective memory.

While writing this script I thought of Proust and of the contrast between losttime and re-found time - or how to live the radiant moments (the Polaroids) which have remained hidden in the stream of time (the labyrinth of hands). I thought about psychoanalysis - which I am certainly not well disposed to, caught up as it is in an intimidating doctrinal vocabulary - but which teaches ushow memory (the hands) manipulates desire (the moments). I thought of the way of the cross, where the muscles are crushed by the strain (the labyrinth) but where at every station the pilgrim is supposed to be blessed with some revelation (the Polaroids) - as with all paths of initiation. Finally I thought of the dying who see their lives flashing before their eyes, I think I will die looking at my hands. It is with them we weave a destiny of images for ourselves.

This is a story of a memory at work: its flowerings, its resistances, its stirrings, the interplay between its creative energies, its words without meaning ... This is the everyday story of a dream: a story of changes, intensification, and of labyrinthine shifting ...

Technical Background
HW: Hewlett Packard
SW: S.V. (Synthetic Video)