SHAPESHIFTER

The first comprehensive publication documenting Israeli artist and experimental cinematographer Ran Slavin’s work.

This book presents an introspective selection of works in film, video, installation and sound. While thinking of the design of the book and how to represent moving images on paper, I decided on a structure of fifteen uniquely designed chapters in which, through a slightly differing layout, each chapter would focus on a different work.
Each chapter aspires to appear both as a visual experience, encapsulating the cinematic energy of the works, and as a documentary of the physical installation, freeze frames, sound and music. Each chapter also includes a QR code for extended digital audio-visual expansions.

Active since the early 1990s, Slavin’s transmedia production encompasses narrative films, immersive installations, photography, soundscapes and CGI multiverses. A perfect example of what could be dubbed “Israeli Futurism,” Slavin’s tech-based output elicits a reflection on the conflictual dynamics at the basis of Israel and the ongoing metamorphosis of Jewish identity. The book offers an overview of the artist’s main projects to date through a visual flow that echoes the floating cinematic imagery and futuristic ethereal phantasies that make Slavin’s work so distinctive and mesmerizing. Drawing from cinema, videogames and anime, Slavin’s art reminds us that the distinction between reality and dreaming, the material and immaterial, and the visible and invisible has never been so blurred as in our post-pandemic times.
--- Francesco Spampinato