Eye Ardentía
Expanded Film Performance
3 x 16mm, color, sound, +/- 35 min.
Ardentía is a word used by spanish seamen to refer to noctiluca in biology, a luminescent plankton that reproduce on the sea surface and is seen at night. It glares on darkness like burning water or stardust. Here acts as an allegory to hypnagogic vision, as a free interpretation of the pulsating phosphenes in our closed eyes.
Miguel Ángel Puertas (1980, Almería Spain) filmmaker and audio-video artist. Since 2006 he’s been exploring as a self-taught the filmic alchemy and collaborates with film labs in Belgium and Spain, focusing on experimental film and expanded cinema. An approach in which the settings between sound and light activate the viewer’s experience to expand the perception. Miguel Ángel Puertas experiments with the simultaneous projection of several 16mm projectors and the superimposition of celluloid film strips live-edited through filters, devices or objects.
Starting from studies in Artistic Photography and Advertising Graphics, with a focus on the autonomy of the creative process, his work moves from the workshops to the projection room. Initiated in video art, he worked and collaborated as an editor for the production companies such as Neon Rouge, MoonWorld Records and RTBF, and for the independent LABO Brussels and Crater Lab Barcelona.
Co-founder of the art collectives Noctiluca Film, OniroKino, and Gui ColleC, he pursued a collaborative exchange between filmmaker and musician with an analogue aestethic approach. He has partecipated with solo exhibitions in galleries and theaters in many countries and in international festivals such as Oberhausen Film Festival, MEM Bilbao, MIEFF Moscow, Process Film Fest Riga and L’Alternativa Barcelona.
Actually he lives and works in a small village immersed in the nature in South Spain, where he runs his artist film lab expanding the knowledge of analogue film through workshops on experimental film techniques.