At the beginning of my thesis, I wrote several papers and gave two lectures on the work of Japanese artist Atsuko Uda. One of these research projects was published in the book Formes audiovisuelles connectées (Connected Audiovisual Forms) in 2018.
I would like to return here to the Hands-on Movies that the artist produced around 2000. Written as short interactive comic strips, these clickable video poems question the idea of an image that is read rather than looked at. These formats were produced for the web and are now obsolete, but they are designed to be scrolled through with the cursor. Interviewed by researcher Jean Louis Boissier, the artist notes that "Viewing this work is like reading small comic strips when you're alone. The screen is divided into two parts and you watch different stories at the same time." The interactivity specific to the web allows for this unfolding, which, in retrospect, raises pertinent questions about our actions on the internet, particularly that of wasting time online, doing nothing in particular or sharing a narrative moment.
I would therefore like to return to Atsuko Uda's A Couple. An Autumn Day.
Winter. Sunday afternoon.
Echo of the sound of boiling kettle.
Drinking hot tea.
Atsuko Uda sets the scene: a single location, a single unit of time, and a single action—a Japanese couple enjoying tea on a Sunday afternoon. When you hover your mouse over the white space on the web page, you see a profile shot of the couple facing each other. Behind each character is an element of nature: we assume that the garden of the house and its flowers are behind the female character on the right, and an old leafless tree, also probably slumbering in the garden, on the left. If we place the mouse on the image, it splits in two and the characters are now facing the camera, taking each other's point of view. If our mouse is on the left of the image, the man looks at the camera; if our cursor is on the right, the other character looks up. The one we point at with the mouse looks at us, or rather looks at the other: both the viewer and the character facing them. By pointing, we show a character, who looks at us, and we mark a pause, a stop in the action. These characters seek dialogue through their gaze but are also disturbed by this gesture, as they are pulled out of their tea break. They are both waiting for a discussion that the viewer seems to be initiating and disturbed by the breaking of this gentle silence.
And that's where the interaction with the image ends. No other action is possible, no other image to discover, just this couple looking up and drinking their autumn tea.
The whole is composed of three video loops: the first when the mouse is not on the image, the second when the cursor is on the left character, and the third when it is on the right one. And this will necessarily be the case, regardless of the order in which we see these three loops. This sequence brings a form of latency to the work; if you are not there, they will still drink their tea. Unlike the spectators, these two characters will never leave their pause; they are trapped in this small gesture of everyday life, in a duration that seems infinite and unquantifiable by its frozen aspect. The writing of this waiting is a central point for starting an interaction. Jean-Louis Boissier adds, "The concrete problem in an interactive narrative, where the continuation depends on the reader's gesture, which remains in suspense if the reader does nothing, is precisely to create this suspension that allows the reader to do nothing. The triggering, the exit from the loop, then appears as the zero degree of bifurcation." The composition is therefore rudimentary, a loop that leads to two others; we pass from one to the other incessantly, varying the angle of view on this infinite tea break. The notable transformation lies in the camera gaze of the two characters. The scene pauses and only leaves this frozen state when the viewer removes the cursor from the image. By obtaining this gaze from the character, we enter into contact with them, we free them from the loop in which they are trapped. It's a bit like freeing the character from their status to give them back that of a human being; their gaze momentarily leaves the flatness of the image to project into the viewer's space. It's about reclaiming intimacy with someone, intimacy that video completely prevents. This moment of pause is like freezing time to be able, for a moment, to connect with the two people present. This relationship with the updated filmed image can only take place in a duration that becomes that of the viewer, that of the cursor's movement. It will vary if the viewer is taken aback, embarrassed, amused, or not receptive to this project.
We are clearly dealing with a complex phenomenon here. This is an image filmed in advance, and therefore irrevocably in the past. But its updating, its looping, ultimately achieves what Luis Buñuel was seeking: to free it from time, or rather to anchor it indefinitely in the present. The updating and the play of the gaze bring a presence, a direct interaction with the viewer, who enters the scene uninvited. The camera gaze is not a new cinematic effect; it has been used many times to create contact with the viewer. But here, it is the viewer who activates the camera gaze, who calls out to the character. It is not the author who decided that at this precise moment the character should look at the camera, but the viewer who decides to mark their presence. A filmed image cannot, by its very nature, be in the present, and yet its actualization brings it back to the present indefinitely. The real phenomenological difficulty here is that the narrative integrates the viewer and their temporality. The past integrates the present and the characters seem indefinitely alive. I navigate through a database that is indeed there, that is indeed present and that updates before me. We are in the midst of this perceptual difficulty that Henri Bergson highlights between quantitative time and qualitative time. The former can indicate the number of loops I have seen, the time spent in front of the screen but can in no way give me the temporal feeling I had in front of these videos, in front of these gazes that scrutinize me. It is a different perceived time that is that of the brief relationship I have with these two characters.
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But today, in 2025, it is as a reader tired of the speed of the web that I look at this work again. Lost in the limbo of the internet archives, I find this couple, still drinking tea, stuck in the loop of an obsolete language. Still there, calm, pensive, they offer a break from the contemporary pace, restoring autumn's charm, stopping us for just a second to reflect on the meaning of this speed, of these thousands of images digested every day, of these miles of advertising scrolled through. Bergsonian duration has never resonated so strongly with me because it is my time-quantity that the attention economy attacks, so I can resist in time-quality, provided I take the time to look, read, and interact with the forms that allow it.
It is by participating in a digital tea break that I regain control over my virtual spaces, that I reflect on my condition as a digitized human being, that I rediscover meaning in this minimal interactive narrative form. Even more so than the first time.
Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1970.
Atsuko Uda, A Couple, Hands-On Movie, 1999-2001
Pierre Barboza, Jean-Louis Weissberg, L’image actée : scénarisations numériques, parcours du séminaire « L’action sur l’image », Paris : L'Harmattan, 2006.
Jean-Louis Boissier, « L’image-relation », dans La relation comme forme : l’interactivité en art, nouvelle version augmentée, Dijon : Les presses du réel, 2008
FIG 01. Atsuko Uda, A Couple. An Autumn Day, 2000