5 videos, different lengths, 2009

These videos focus on the use of alter egos to explore personal and cultural identity.
They also aim to research the codes of Romanticism in a contemporary context. The title itself refers to the German term ‘Sturm Und Drang’, a name chosen by 19th century German poets to describe their state of longing and despair.
This feeling has here been channeled through the fictional character Oscar Scar, an ambiguous teenage-like figure, and transposed to the contemporary world of YouTube videos and Black Metal.
A series of video diary episodes is combined with footage from Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet”, with an obsessive description of the face of Arthur Rimbaud as portrayed by Carjat in 1973, and with images of Oscar’s own avatar on a 3D chat.
The videos, divided in five chapters, utilise a method of expression which can be compared to that of a collage, or of pastiche. The character Oscar Scar portrays himself, his dreams and his pains, through a continuous reference to other characters.
Oscar Scar is a fictional character who wants to find his real self, and he does so trying to become other fictional (or fictionalised) characters.
The looping movement of each chapter, and the fact that each chapter begins with the same (borrowed) motif, very much like a tv series, suggests that his quest is unlikely, that he himself has been created as being part of a fiction, and he will play his role over and over again.
Oscar moves through (virtual) time and space,he playfully and rather superficially takes up one mask or another, and his life seems to have the non-narrative, zapping quality of TV rather than of a novel. And yet, it is only through these masks, that he can be Oscar.