PARIS.- Moving Stills is part of the European Month of Photography, which brings together festivals in Paris, Berlin, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Rome and Vienna. It is the second edition of Mutations, an event focusing on technological and artist change in photography, and offers a selection of videos made by European artists. A growing number of photographers are using video, and this is changing the specific criteria that define both crafts. Apart from the diversity of their aesthetic standpoints and of the visual techniques they use, the artists presented in Mutations II encourage us to step beyond the territorial considerations and academic definitions which tend to ring-fence artistic fields, and to explore the boundaries that separate them.

In other words Mutations II invites us to discover new territory, investigating both fixed and moving images via the tensions that motivate them. Aesthetic tension between the instant and passing time is illustrated in the work of artists such as Peter Aeschermann and Tuomo Raino, who seek to imbue the photogra- phic image with temporal depth. Narrative tension between photography, video and sound sequences leads us into the disturbing dream world of Gast Bouchet and Nadine Hilbert, or into the theatricality of daily life in Russia as shown by Olga Chernysheva. Perceptive tension characteristic of transitory states of space and time can be experienced in the work of Ori Gersht, Christoph Brech and Jutta Strohmaier.

What these European artists have in common is the way they submit photo- graphy and/or video to various forms of distortion. In this way they explore the lines of perspective that form at the boundaries of the two territories, setting up a new regime of image and perception. By the same token, they push the photographic and videographic idiom to its limits, and it is these very limits that constitute the necessary condition for the emergence of originality and of 'style' as defined by Deleuze. These new experiments in pushing pho- tography and video over the edge of their habitually assigned boundaries give us a unique opportunity to take a fresh look at the world and encourage us to re-invent our daily lives, seeing them 'according to the artwork', to quote Merleau-Ponty.