Mistakes was made in the midst of the first Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. It was originally conceived as a remote artist talk, but can also be considered an intermediary progress report for my doctoral research.

Pressed by the impossibly tight deadline of just over a week, the creation process barely discerned between conceptual conception and production. Most of the scenes were created during that time frame – with some elements lifted from unfinished projects in my hard-drive archives. As a demarcation parameter, I set a duration of twenty minutes and twenty seconds (20’20”). 

Mistakes combines 3d animation, text, audio, and postproduction, all of which were part of my body of work before, but adds new applications that had just become available to me, such as 3d scanning and motion capture. However, the approaching deadline forced me to abandon labour-intensive realistic scenes. Instead, the departure point of an artist talk inspired a more graphic and eclectic format of a PowerPoint slideshow presentation.

My first concern was my role as the narrator in the film’s universe: it was an artist talk, after all. I quickly dismissed live recordings, because I felt inadequately represented by my physical self in the digital spaces of my virtual studio. The most straight-forward solution was to resort to using different types of avatars, virtual ‘talking heads’. 

Another challenge was to find coherence in the build-up of the ‘talk’. The film was made chronologically, chapter by chapter. Most of the fourteen chapters are announced by large titles appearing across the screen. Some chapters transition smoothly from one segment into another, others are hard cuts.

In order to maintain an overall consistency throughout the film, I used a recurring musical soundtrack – albeit in various forms – of a looped instrumental audio sample of the song ‘I’m Sorry’ by American country artist Brenda Lee. Lee, who was 15 at the time of the recording, sings about dealing with the rejection of a love interest. In the lyrics she laments: “I’m sorry, so sorry, that I was such a fool; I didn’t know love could be so cruel”, continued by: “Mistakes are part of being young”. 

The ‘mistakes’ from the film’s title not only reference Lee’s song but also cover a handful of productional errors in the film that were made due to pressed time. Additionally, the film was made just over seven months in the research trajectory: some of the concepts that are introduced in the film were in a premature, exploratory phase and have since been abandoned or transformed.

Because of its impromptu production that with immediacy responded to the situation, the video has become somewhat of a document of this specific and unusual period. However, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the video transcends the specific conditions in which it was made. 

Mistakes was followed up by NGMI in 2022. The ‘Complicit’ chapter was reworked into an installation, also in 2022.

Antwerp, April 28, 2020

Wednesday, April 29, 2020 anno covidii, I was supposed to give a talk over lunch at the end of my two months involvement with Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, New York.

This, of course, took place in another universe. Instead, I flew back home to Belgium on March 15 for obvious reasons.

Back in my studio, I had trouble processing all information I managed to gather during my short stay, and everything that’s connected to the current virus crisis. A weird overlap between my body of work, my research, and this Situation has occurred. I lost sight of the Universe of Former Normality, in which I was still in New York.

Last week, RU’s Rachel reached out to me, asking if I would be willing to give the talk anyway, through means of a recording of some sort. I suddenly snapped out of artistic bewilderment – I’ve been starting projects since I returned, but nothing at this point really materialized in a satisfactory way – and made this 20 minute hyperspace powerpoint video work, explaining my research, using fragments and frays of halfly finalized ideas.

This is by far the longest film I ever made in the shortest time available. There’s a lot more I wanted to address, but for now, this is it. Thanks for watching.

Credits: All images and soundtracks by Alexandra Crouwers, except for: a fragment of Bald Terror’s ‘Rotterdam’, a sample of Brenda Lee’s ‘I’m sorry’, the Marvel character Thanos is mentioned, it uses YouTube footage of jumpstyle dancers, gifs from Giphy, two sound effects of freesound.org, and smoke effects from pixabay.

This video is made possible with the kind support of Mondriaan Fonds, Kunstloc Brabant, and the Vlaamse Gemeenschap.