The collective Zemos98 has put together an existential video out of the initial necessity to make something, “a bizarre short film”, without any preconceived ideas. They present a red ad man (with red overalls, wig and a red painted face), in Seville’s city centre on a saturday morning, who systematically asks passers-by: “Am I real?” With this, Zemos98 construct a video that, like a series of notes, which continue in their web page, recreates itself in a hypertextual metaloop. They hereby create a labyrinth of personal logics that aims to open up new dimensions to the story by using it as the trigger for a creation in a permanent state of mutation.

The collective’s work on video is the tip of the iceberg of manifold projects on communication and aesthetic experiences with social concerns. Videoenrecreant deals with the particularities of video, by searching for an idea, transforming, evaluating and executing it by recording a public action, a confessional interview, or a visual and sound intervention that confronts the paradoxes of the institutionalised creative process. Zemos98 observes by trying things out, surprising, captivating, saturating, and finally generating, out of a seemingly innocent question, multiple unresolved further questions. Yet, one idea remained clear for the makers of the video as regards this tangle of hypertextual lines: the video had to be premiered at the Zemos98 Festival on the 1st of March.

The basis of Videoenrecreant is the challenge for the different members of the collective to deconstruct and put together a video fragment, lasting no more than five minutes, about a character who yearns for an idea yet never finds it. It is no doubt also part of the collective’s ongoing investigation of communication in relationship with collective creation, manipulation and metanarratives. The basic rule of the game, which guaranteed the cohesion of the whole piece, was that each fraction had to recreate that same fragment, as well as the rest of the existing material (including the music score composed especially for this piece by Fran M. M. Cabeza De Vaca).

The final edition of the video was realised by Felipe G. Gil, who acted as the game’s referee. Out of this exercise resulted a formless plurality of points of view, a functionless and aimless amalgamation of metanarratives, a video hieroglyph whose structures have been predetermined by the provisionality of the circumstances of its reception.

Videoenrecreant is a plural piece defined by the delirium and rapture that the multiple textual discontinuities by the different participating authors condense in a linear narrative. While offering a critique of the divisions of creative labour into theorists and producers, Zemos98 attempt to achieve an interactivity of synergies by joining conception and solution together, as each author reaffirms herself in the other. Merged together in the collective enthusiasm of individuals who leave their particularities behind in order to participate in this creative debauchery, they are each stimulated by the different situations that generate the various processes.