Nino Rodgriguez
Boy
1994
USA

Biography
Nino Rodriguez is thirty, and he's lived in Los Angeles forever. He never practiced piano enough, and always played the music no one likes to hear. Music theory still nags him even after earning an MFA in Film and Video at UCLA. Since 1988, his short videos, films, and digital media have shown at the Dallas Video Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Museum of Modern Art, and other places, too. Nino's won prizes in seven countries, and people said intellectual things about his work at The Robert Flaherty Seminar. Nino is currently working on long-term plans, sees his friends sporadically, and spends his nights wondering if he leads an artificial life.

Conceptual Description

A young woman searches for her early childhood. The fragments collide and tenuously connect. She struggles to reconstruct her history. A hesitation, and she starts again. Emotional truth provides little solid ground. A narrative erupts and immediately dissolves. Her desire for meaning imperfectly masks uncertainty. She re-examines her memory and assembles a new past.

A participant watches the young woman speak. Her words fill the space behind her image. There is no more room. Her words disappear and begin again. The participant intervenes. The woman's image is gone, but her voice persists. The participant interrupts. The young woman is here again. She repeats herself, but what follows is new. Another intervention. Another repetition. Another path.

The young woman's stories are divided into over one hundred short moments. The order she tells them is determined randomly. Our desire to pull meaning from the whole interferes with an awareness that the pieces follow each other arbitrarily. The encounter both portrays and reproduces the uncertainty of memory. Her desire to find truth infects the participant's desire to comprehend. Where traditional media transform memory into nostalgia, we are discovering what interactive media will manufacture from our desire.

Boy can be exhibited as a one-on-one experience, displayed continuously as an installation, or screened for an audience. (Running time: 10+ minutes, 1994)