On-site at Flow of time——David Claerbout and Zhou Tao, The Cloud Collection, 2025-26: David Clearbout, the 'confetti' piece (2015-2018), Two-channel video projection, 3D animation (color, silent), 25min18sec ©The Cloud Collection

Jonathan Pouthier in conversation with David Claerbout：The ‘confetti’ piece

The original text was published in The Silence of the Lens, Hannibal Books, 2022. In the following text, JP stands for Jonathan Pouthier, and DC stands for David Claerbout. All subsequent content will use these abbreviations accordingly.

(JP) Showered by a cloud of confetti, the participants at an unspecified political event celebrate what could be an election victory. And yet this scene of collective, almost ecstatic jubilation remains strangely silent and frozen in time. By reinvesting the field of political representation, The Confetti Piece reactivates an extremely codified and deliberately theatricalised iconography. Paradoxically, we know that these kinds of representations are often those that show us nothing directly. It is always a question of going beyond the visual order of a stereotyped composition to detect the layers of meaning in it. What can this iconographic register, borrowed from the theatricalisation of politics, tell us?
David Claerbout Video still from the 'confetti' piece (2015-2018) Two-channel video projection, 3D animation (color, silent) 25min18sec Courtesy the artist and EstherSchipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul, ©the artist

(DC) The Confetti Piece takes place at an unspecified political event that could be likened to an election night. Confetti has been thrown in the air and the participants seem to be celebrating a victory. If we adopt the perspective of political thinking, this undefined situation with no date and no names can trigger a certain unease. We lack the information to position ourselves in relation to these celebratory images. In formal terms, the scene is organised around a horizontal axis marking a separation between top and bottom, light and shadow. Completely saturating the foreground, the confetti acts as a negotiating agent between the upper and lower parts of the image. Although divided into two distinct and symbolic levels, but also marked by particularly contrasting antagonisms, the composition nevertheless reveals a certain idea of community. After all, an event with confetti is always a moment of celebration and unity. This idea was already present in earlier pieces such as The Algiers' Sections of a Happy Moment (2008). At the time, l was seeking to make this kind of idealised image explicit through the portrait of a group of young Algerians perched on a roof in the kasbah of Algiers, and the observation of, let's say, modern ideals about the notions of future, freedom and light. What mattered to me at the time was to make two opposing views co-exist in the same shot, and to show the different layers that make up an image.

the 'confetti' piece (production screenshot)

(JP) This form of political representation is, by definition, normative and rhetorical. You yourself describe this iconographic register as simplistic and literal. However,  your film is about these entirely constructed images. What interests you in this symbolist and idealised visual order?

(DC) The Confetti Piece is fully in the register of the picturesque. This is particularly evident in the care taken with the treatment of light, which is shattered by the presence of the confetti that fills the frame. I was, above all, motivated by this simple desire to interact with the light in order to alter the visual order of the representation. In a sense, the confetti appears to me as a perfect illustration of the pixel. It makes explicit the pixelated nature of the image and of the digital projection. It is a mise en abyme , as it were, of the artificial light that is atomised into a multitude of particles. Ultimately, the film's extras are merely contemplating the pixelation of their own image. At first sight, the iconography of The Confetti Piece is deliberately simple, not to say literal. It seems possible to grasp its content with a single glance. Although this scene remains indeterminate in terms of time, geography and ideology, these images are similar to all others of the same type. They are an integral part of our collective imagination. That is why I consider them simplistic.  They are based as much on our memory of them as on our active perception of the scene on the screen. In other words, the lived experience of a given situation is not superior to the idea we may have of it. This comes down to locating the observation on the basis of the concept of something, and not the other way around. This is probably why these images appear so schematic to us. We can ask ourselves when an image becomes picturesque. Is it not precisely at the moment when the image ends up completely merging into this schematic visual order and no longer sharing anything with the unexpected things of visual perception?

(JP) Confetti is part of the carnival tradition. It represents one of the most important motifs of entertainment. In your film, it prevents the gaze from going beyond the foreground and takes the tension out of the scene. It is as if we were dealing with a disguised image. Why make it the central subject of your film? What does this meeting between the iconography of politics and that of entertainment produce?

(DC) The making of this film was driven, above all, by the pictorial pleasure of breaking the conventional visual order. The confetti motif allows me to reactivate the relatively common pictorial principle of the tension between surface and depth. By filling the foreground of the composition, the confetti eventually flattens the surface. I also believe that confetti resists the egotistical viewpoint of the lens, but also any effort to rationalise its behaviour. Its movements are unpredictable and cannot be determined in space and time by fixed coordinates. They are, in a way, agents of visual disorder. I also tried to induce, through them, a vertical tendency that can pull the scene upwards and underline the division of the composition between gravity and absence of gravity. I intervene precisely in the phenomenology of light to reverse the principle of lightness. By mixing with the confetti, the light source ends up producing a bright image and inducing two antagonistic tones. Thus, this source of light appears at once violent, when it extends over the child, and festive when it illuminates the other characters. It is a bit like watching a fireworks factory go up in flames. Obviously, the confetti motif carries with it the metaphor of the politicised particle whose blue, white and red colours can bring to mind, in the collective imagination, those of the French or American flags. With this film, I wanted to make explicit the different layers of the image and draw attention to the ideological power relations underlying the order of representation. This gesture is deliberately comparable to woke thinking, where it is also a question of perceiving and separating the layers of the image that usually rest on each other. In The Confetti Piece , the light thus comes to rest like a weight on the darkness. Paradoxically, the light that usually represents lightness comes to exert a gravity here. My intention was to work with a deliberately exaggerated iconography. The confetti only amplifies this phenomenon of exaggeration.

the 'confetti' piece (production screenshot)

(JP) This iconographic exaggeration allows you to make explicit the subtext and the nature of the visual order. The over-aestheticising regime that you adopt would then only be a pretext to invite us to look through the surface of the image. Is it a question of luring viewers in order to encourage them to deconstruct the mechanisms of representation by themselves?

(DC) The Confetti Piece was made entirely in the studio. The people on screen never existed together. The dots on the screen, the confetti, are a way of moving the model of the image towards that of the cloud. I have always believed that the image and the cloud dissolve into each other. In fact, that's why I was drawn to the idea of the particle floating in space and in the depth of the shot.

the 'confetti' piece (behind the scenes)

It immediately induces an index of lightness in the composition. The whole geometry of the building where this scene is set - based on the architecture of Bentheim Castle in Germany (painted by Jacob van Ruisdael in the seventeenth century) scanned in secret and modified afterwards - was generated in 3D so that I could control the light. My intention was to summon silence, light and lightness, which are traditional allies of the picturesque style in the pictorial tradition. Moreover, the Gothic tone of the architecture is not random either.I produced it so that this place could look like a church. Then there is the silent cry of the child and the astonishment of his parents that draw the gaze downwards. It is at the moment of this inaudible cry that we become aware that the confetti forms an iron curtain. The confetti no longer negotiates between the different components of the image but separates the characters from the scene and blocks the point of view. The cubist ambition to achieve numerous angles promises the most complete perception of the situation. What becomes increasingly clear, understandable and legible in spatial terms ends up splitting over the course of the film.

the 'confetti' piece (production screenshot)

(JP) While the composition seems to bestructured around vertical and horizontal axes (that is, treatment of space and linearity of time), the confetti seems to escape the organisation of the shot. It induces a random dimension in the visual order and interferes in the reading of the image. What are you looking for by creating this situation that at once attracts and frustrates the gaze?

(DC) The narrative framework of the filmbecomes literal with these images that direct the gaze upwards. I borrow this ancient principle of composition which is based on a certain theatricalisation of the pictorial field. The ubiquitousness of confetti in the foreground impedes a clear reading of the scene and prevents the eye from orienting itself in the shot. I think that the frustration can also be the result of a lack of development in the film. Time seems suspended. The slow, almost imperceptible movements of the confetti and the extras actually underline this impossible development of the action and the story. The film becomes even more explicitly silent when a young boy starts shouting and no one can hear him. The fact that we would like to be able to hear this scream, which remains deliberately absent from this succession of silent images, is also particularly frustrating. In The Confetti Piece , we seek to understand a space that remains relentlessly fragmented.

the 'confetti' piece (production screenshot)

(JP) If the foreground is obstructed by this cloud of suspended confetti, the background is clearly organised around particularly contrasting political, social and cultural antagonisms. By underlining this division in the composition, you make use of two modalities of the gaze that everything opposes. We can stop at the surface of the image or, alternatively, decide to reject its naive and superficial appearance.

(DC) The confetti envelops the entire scene like a snowy landscape that unites each character in a kind of shared immobility. The child's silent cry introduces a dissonance in the composition. It signals the presence of two resolutely incompatible modes of looking. On the one hand, there is the pictorial gaze that celebrates itself in the middle of this scene. Then there is the reformatory gaze, which could be called woke, which makes latent narratives explicit. I had in mind the spiral dynamics model developed by Ken Wilber. For Wilber, human development resembles an inverted cone, with spiral staircases going from instinct, tradition, brute force, authority and pragmatism to the pluralistic wholeness of the postmodern mindset. In this visualised model of the evolution of stages of human consciousness and value systems, woke thinking would be at the level of so-called empathic pluralism, hence inclusive and integral, which tends - oh, tragedy - to disconnect itself from the lower levels of this spiral model. I therefore seek to make explicit what was to remain implicit in the order of representation by simultaneously adopting these two modalities of looking. These are two readings that contradict one another. What interests me is to confront them.

the 'confetti' piece (production wall)

(JP) In what way does this confrontation of gazes call into question the nature and legitimacy of the pictorial register?

(DC) This opposition is between the defined and the hyper-defined aspects of the image. The pluralistic postmodern phase tends to produce a break when it seeks to define something more clearly, often an injustice. The defined then becomes hyper-defined. Every relationship between the different levels of the composition is then interpreted as a conflict. This is what happens when we adopt a woke perspective. That is why the motifs that find me (I never search for them) are often simplistic. They seem too clear in what they want to express. The hyper-defined shares the same paralysing effects as the hyper-conscious. This same principle recurs in the articulation between abstract language and lived language. It sometimes happens that abstract language wants to, in its turn, reform thought. The accidental misuse of this abstract language can lead to severe retaliation. While language helps us to see, here it remains blind.

(JP) Paradoxically, there is nothing realistic about the iconographic regime you rely on. It tends towards an exaggerated idealisation of the scene and the subject. Faced with the images in The Confetti Piece , we can't help but think back to the great painted historical frescoes we inherited from the nineteenth century. In what way does this reinvestment of the pictorial tradition participate in the construction of a critical gaze?

(DC) Indeed, The Confetti Piece revives the pictorial tradition of nineteenth-century history painting with its monumental effects nineteenth-century history painting with its monumental effects and inconsequential exoticism. We explicitly become tourists in the context of this painting. We are detached and, in turn, look down from above. In fact, it is probably no coincidence that the century in which this pompous pictorial genre reached its peak was also the century marked by colonial expansion and the Industrial Revolution, but also by the invention of photography. I was drawn by the idea of false splendour conveyed by history painting because I saw in it a parallel with the weakness of the projector. There is nothing brilliant about projected light. That is the very paradox of the film: as soon as you stop the projection, it's over.

David Claerbout Video still from the 'confetti' piece (2015-2018) Two-channel video projection, 3D animation (color, silent) 25min18sec Courtesy the artist and EstherSchipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul, ©the artist

(JP) While all the characters seem to be plunged into a quasi-psychotic state close to trance, a black child appears isolated from the group and starts to scream. What is this frightened character doing in the scene?

(DC) The scene with the child screaming paradoxically brings us back to silence. In my opinion, silence has no better ally than this unheard cry. It is what brings breath to fill the space of silence. The child almost seems to protect himself from the weight of the confetti. In a way, we have to deal with all these unfulfilled sensory impulses that do not provide any answer by themselves. At the same time, all the pictorial components of the composition - the colours, the clothes, the scene - provide answers, almost too easily, in fact. This has always interested me. This is something that can be found in Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, reconstruction after Hiromichi Mine (2000). Can the obviousness of the image be accompanied by something that prevents its meaning from being brought to a close? There is nothing worse than closing an image. I even consider it a crime.

the 'confetti' piece (production screenshot)

(JP) What do you mean by bringing an image to a close?

(DC) It means depriving the image of its contingencies and polysemy. This is exactly what happens when we make explicit what should remain implicit. It is obviously not the image that is being deprived, but the potential to look twice. The woke generation tends to overexpose the subtleties of language. The Enlightenment was also the age of overexposure, leading to the worst atrocities through the mere power of the word. It was also during this period of history that an attempt was made to assign a fixed address to what could, or should, have remained dynamic. It is interesting to note that we are now living in an age where every source of information is dependent on an IP address and everypixel in a virtual image is determined by coordinates. The dynamism of new visual technologies like 3D is proving to be engaged in a complicated relationship with the natural dynamism of all life forms.

(JP) The film functions as a self-contained environment viewed through the magnifying glass of a microscope. Returned to its state of suspended particle, the confetti motif informs us about the composite nature of this image. It induces a visual noise, a disturbance of the signal, in the visual order of the composition. How do these particles enable you to clarify the technological matrix of these images?

(DC) The technological evolution of video projection has led to a quietness of the signal that could be compared to a perfect stillness. When we become aware of the cycle of Hertzian frequencies that make up this signal, a noise settles within us. The apparent stillness becomes nervous. If we take a step back, we can see that most of the technologies we think are stable (the screen, the projector, electric light) share these same frequencies. We are nowsurrounded by them. They define our relationship with time and take control of our daily behaviour. There is a dynamic relationship between noise and stability. In fact, frequency allows us to perceive movement. Paradoxically, if we become too aware of their presence, we risk becoming immobilised. This is something that has often interested me in relation to duration. There is a deceptive tranquillity to the hyper-digital and the hyper-defined that can easily make us forget that all these things are made up of frequencies and breaks in the natural flow of time. After that, there might be a kind of deep sleep that would be like a kind of calm, soothing meditation. This is part of what  fascinates me about the synthetic image.

David Claerbout Video still from the 'confetti' piece (2015-2018) Two-channel video projection, 3D animation (color, silent) 25min18sec Courtesy the artist and EstherSchipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul, ©the artist

(JP) The Confetti Piece is conceived as an installation for two screens. This theatricalisation of the film seems to be a way of re-staging these modes of political representation. By adopting this configuration, you once more give viewers an active role in the interpretation of the images.

(DC) With each presentation of The Confetti Piece I seek to produce a void between the two screens that make up the installation. I try to make it difficult to observe all the details in the composition simultaneously. This allows me to implement the principle of fragmentation on which this film is based. It is also a fairly banal way of theatricalising the moving image. I want to make it clear, however, that I don't see myself at all as someone who approaches installation in a sculptural way. On the other hand, if we turn our attention to the phenomenon of light projection, I can imagine myself as a sculptor taking into account the usurping weakness of an electronic light source that thinks of itself as a substitute for the Sun. In a sense, I am sculpting this simulacrum. A work like Shadow Piece (2005) already dealt with the weakness of the projector that sees itself as majestic and solar. Finally, let's not forget that the most important aspect of projection is the viewer, not the light source or the screen surface. It is a common mistake to isolate  the projection technology from the viewer. The biology of the viewer determines everything. Too often we tend to think that the technology works alone. I don't try to capture the viewer's attention in the video installation. You have to lose it before you can continue the journey together.