Synopses

While seeing her studio being pestered by ants, Catarina Simões became aware of the insects' dystopian potential and decided to turn their characteristics into character traits.

The Home Planet is, thus, a video meta-fiction, which, while depicting the artist’s reaction to a plague infestation, also acts as a case study about the narrative nature of our perception of reality.
Upon combining the staging of a documentary, with the construction of a pure ’cinematographic truth’*: the video takes the form of a science-fiction tale composed of three layers:
1- A narrators derange for what is being seen.
2- The monologue, voicing the viewpoint of the ants themselves as characters in a science fiction.
3- The meta-reference to the artist’s own odd “ant-farm” construction, as her way to cope with
the studio invasion and as the documentation of the swarming enemy’s tactics.
Dissecting the relationship between the representation of reality and the reality of representation, The Home Planet is a sculptural object that takes shape in the mind of the observer.
  
*Referencing Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda
    

Catarina Simões

 

Technical Information:

The Home Planet, 2006

vídeo, DV PAL SP, colour, 07'40’’; projection 720 x 480 cm

 

Script

It dawn on them. / Under a strange sun the new simulation began and they got back to work. / - So far we’ve been playing against the computer, or against each other. But starting now… / - And then, said nothing more about it, until he ordered the envoy to use it where the enemy fleet was most concentrated. / The thing jolted setting up a chain reaction that leaped from ship to ship to ship. / All but the last orbit of formic ships were destroyed. / - Next time they’ll have learned! / - It smelled fishy… / - These aren’t tests, these are setups! Preparations for the scenario that might come when they’ll face the actual bugger fleet, near the home planet. / - This is the home planet – / He almost said the words but caught himself. / A long time passed. Many seconds perhaps a minute. / - Ready to move? / (by now he usually had them all deployed). / A light blinked on console. He knew what it meant. / There is no strategy. / A formation orbiting the display. / For one thing he told them to ignore the manoeuvre in the centre of the display. / - It was a decoy! But how could he know that!? / Thought back to those videos watched over and over in training, all the film of the last invasion. / - They never showed the battle, because there wasn’t one. That’s why there’s no video of hand to hand combat. Killed the queen. Killed the queen. / The second thing that he knew and they didn’t was the use of a weapon that hadn’t been in any of their simulations, till this first test. They called it master device. / - The XF is getting preliminary information back from the sentinel fleet. / Then came the first of these tests. / Heard that and it made him flinch. / - An invasion sequence!? Why a scenario like that? Why not routines before a single battle?! / Because the buggers had more than one world. They found this planet and expected to turn it into yet another colony, just as they’ve done before. / Put on his headsets as he asked. / – Would it be true? // Nodded. / - Yeah… well I don’t think it would make much difference. Besides, all that matters is the queen. Like the one killed in the last invasion. / - There’s a queen here. / - Where!? / - On the planet surface. / - Master device needs glass. / - I guess, since you seem to know everything… / Even though he already knew it. / The thing is… / He was the last of the battery leaders to do so. / - Are you there!? / Over the head sets. / - All of us… / - Kind of late for practice this morning aren’t you? / - Sorry I overslept. / They laugh. / Except. Their fleet was deployed around the centre of the display. There have been battles near towers before but every other time the outpost was near the edge of the display. / - This time there will be no trap, just a formic swarm. / Always staying a certain distance away from each other, followed random intertwining paths, near enough to the planet to deploy master device. / The bugger queen couldn’t give up control of her ships to subordinates. / The individual buggers are like her hands and her feet. Now she has hundreds of hands and feet or perhaps thousands of them, all wiggling at once. That’s why she wasn’t responding intelligently, from taking his battery ever closer to the tower, with every swing and dodge and shift that he made. / In fact, penetrated deeper and deeper into the planet’s gravity well. / The buggers were building a thick wall of forces behind formation. / - It was this! / - Maybe there is some way to get down to the planet surface and annihilate the buggers once and for all. / - Now is the time! / For the others will do their best work, and this time they’ll have figured it out how to make master device themselves. / - Do it! / There flashed into mind the words said in their first day of training. / - Remember… The enemy’s gate is down. / Deploying master device against the planet surface, to obliterate the whole thing, one for each formic world. And the reason they can learn from battle to battle is because, they too, have quantum communication across interstellar space. / All guesses were confirmed. / The only function was to watch how it flowed and then coach after-words, on what the enemy’s strategies meant and how to counter them in the future. / That was why they were giving them most of their commands orally. / Means that. Without a visible quam, the simulator came to life. / - It’s time. / - Good luck! / - Captain may go on strike again. / - When it seams completely unfair and utterly pointless! / - What if I promised him continuity? / The bugger home world was the last one. The fleet there now had left after any of the other fleets. / - It was impossible to determine the number. How the display kept loosing track. How the total amount kept fluctuating. / - You just couldn’t get there from here, to do work. / - We’re done! / - Remember…/ - Fixer! / Mad tom didn’t seem to get the joke, didn’t seem to understand that there was no way to get master device to the planet surface. / Instead, pulled into a tight formation. / - Sure they see, how every other move takes us closer and closer to the planet. / At any moment the enemy could destroy them quickly, by concentrating their forces, and could use master device against them. Having them dodge through the ever shifting formations of one glass tower, the last piece. //Another explanation: could it be? That the queen, or queens, had to spend all their concentration, all their mental strength, just keeping thousands of ships swarming through space, without getting too close to each other?// End.

The Home Planet script was written by Catarina Simões, with the collaboration of Matthew Michel, Adapted from scientific fiction cut-ups of Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury e William Gibson.

Catarina Simões - Biography and curriculum

Catarina Simoes (Lisbon, Portugal, 1973) was an undergrad student at AR.CO and later completed an MFA degree at School of Visual Arts in NYC. She has lived in New York for 6 years, and in 2004 moved to Berlin, where she is currently based.
Mainly grounded in New Media, her body of work focuses on documentary research as a means to produce meta-fiction.

Solo and two-person* exhibitions
2004 Preview*, Pappellallee, Berlin
2002 The Least, Praxis Space, NYC
Selected group exhibitions
2006 Das Fest, Portuguese Embassy, Berlin
2005 Props for a Romantic Comedy, Longwood Arts Gallery, Bronx Museum, NYC
2004 Daydreaming, Slight Alienation, Cruel Kindness & Detached Sentimentality,
Joymore's Gallery, NYC
2004 Drawing Out Loud, HDC Gallery, NYC
2003 Post-Portugal, Off-loop-Video Biennial, Met-room, Barcelona
2002 By Numbers - 6N-G, NYC
2002 Expect the World – Sparwasser HQ, Berlin
2002 Moi Non Plus – Parkhaus Treptaw, Berlin
2000 Apart235, NYC
2000 2000greenspaces, Greenhouse, Lisbon
1999 Espaco1999, Sala do Veado, Natural History Museum, Lisbon
1999 7Artistas ao Decimo Mes, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
1999 BM, Maia Biennial, Maia
1998 Marzee Gallery, Nijmegen
1998 Casaderute, ZDB Gallery, Lisbon
1998 NHXXI, Greenhouse, Lisbon
1997 Lisbona, PD362 Gallery, Padua
1996 Talent96, Munich
Grants / projects / screenings
2006/07 Spaced – S3D (with Ana Pinto and Nuno Cera), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
/ Instituto das Artes. Lisbon
2006 Emerging Video - Influences and Shifts, Pépinières européennes pour jeunes artistes, 19th FIPA, Biarritz
2005 Was Machen Sie, Akademie de Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart
2003 Alive and Gone - Video Screening, BAM, NYC
2002 Drawing The Line - Video Screening, Z-Bar, Berlin
2002 Kunstlerhaus Bethanien - Video Screening, Berlin
2002 Museu do Chiado - Video Screening, Lisbon
2000/02 Research Grant - Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
2000/02 Research Grant - FLAD, Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento, Lisbon
1998 Exchange Program AR.CO/SVA, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and FLAD, School of Visual Arts, NYC
1994/98 AR.CO, Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual, Lisbon
Collections
PCR/Col. Lisbon
AR.CO, Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual, Lisbon