i feel distortion

The beginning of this video is black and its end is white. Both offer something to read, first the title, and then the credits. What can be seen between the two is in a constant transition between black and white. "Reading is not seeing" one could say in a paraphrase of Maurice Blanchot. Rather than a reference to a simple antithesis, this statement addresses the obliteration of seeing which is compelled by the act of reading. The implication is that it depends of the mode of expression whether the act of reading is able to produce a different kind of seeing.
Feeling distortion: In a programmatic sense, Divjak´s title is a retort to the unreasonable expectation in which videos always offer something to see first. Although something is there to see, it is always something already seen: The scratches, the dust particles indicate this fact in the same way as the deceleration of movement and the fragmentation of the frames. Whatever was visible in total clarity - bodies touching and moving through space - is transformed into reading material which clings to the two-dimensional nature of what has already been seen. i feel distortion will work on the disintegration of what has been made obvious through reading to produce the other kind of seeing, which could also be termed feeling. In any case, it takes on the form of a perception which has suddenly been overcome, giving the viewer the sense of having seen "the spaces between the things as things" (Merleau-Ponty).

(Vrääth Öhner)