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Martin Kusch 07-01-2023
In the gallery space, the viewer finds himself between a lamp and a screen and in front of a video monitor. Inside the outline traced by his body, the visitor sees a video image made of mysterious graphic compositions. At the same time, this same video image, previously visible on the monitor, disappears. By his movements and displacements, the spectator creates the artistic product. The work of art takes shape neither in the real space, nor in the space of the screens, but in between these spaces. The installation As far as In-Between is a dynamic system on several levels, stimulating itself in a self-poetic, self-catalytic way. A refracted symmetry, of the visitor and the image, of the body and the abstraction, of reality and illusion. The images erase and deny each other and create, paradoxically, new images. In the illusory world of light and shadow theater, spectators create the art work itself through their body movement and question the originality of a piece of art.
The work does not simply generate the image in the here and now; rather, the visitor’s body produces multiple images in the system of multiple networked images, and this is made possible by the illusory world of light and shadow theater created by media technologies, new at that time. In As far as In-Between the simple act of looking creates the work. At the border between the analog and the digital, exhibited in the white cube of a gallery but existing only through the presence of visitors, this installation already brought, at the time of its creation in 1992, a questioning on the transformation of the art market: what is original, or not? Where is the artistic product when the visitor is part of the work? All these questions, still relevant today, were already there.
On entering the gallery, into that room, the visitor lands in front of an easel, holding an lcd monitor, displaying an abstract image, consisting of a multi-layered RGB color space in permanent mutation. These transformations are combined with the live camera feed from the gallery space including one’s own silhouette, distorting the image. By paying attention, the visitor will notice that the color saturation of the image is fluctuating, as does the spatiality of the moving silhouette. Thanks to surveillance cameras placed inside and outside, it is the movement of the passer-by that influences the live stream of the lcd screen inside the gallery, while the movement of the visitor influences the virtual scenes outside the gallery.
The work does not simply generate the image in the here and now; rather, the visitor’s body produces multiple images in the system of multiple networked images, and this is made possible by the illusory world of light and shadow theater created by media technologies, new at that time. In As far as In-Between the simple act of looking creates the work. At the border between the analog and the digital, exhibited in the white cube of a gallery but existing only through the presence of visitors, this installation already brought, at the time of its creation in 1992, a questioning on the transformation of the art market: what is original, or not? Where is the artistic product when the visitor is part of the work? All these questions, still relevant today, were already there.
Martin Kusch: , 07-01-2023, in: Archive of Digital Art In the gallery space, the viewer finds himself between a lamp and a screen and in front of a video monitor. Inside the outline traced by his body, the visitor sees a video image made of mysterious graphic compositions. At the same time, this same video image, previously visible on the monitor, disappears. By his movements and displacements, the spectator creates the artistic product. The work of art takes shape neither in the real space, nor in the space of the screens, but in between these spaces. The installation As far as In-Between is a dynamic system on several levels, stimulating itself in a self-poetic, self-catalytic way. A refracted symmetry, of the visitor and the image, of the body and the abstraction, of reality and illusion. The images erase and deny each other and create, paradoxically, new images. In the illusory world of light and shadow theater, spectators create the art work itself through their body movement and question the originality of a piece of art.
The work does not simply generate the image in the here and now; rather, the visitor’s body produces multiple images in the system of multiple networked images, and this is made possible by the illusory world of light and shadow theater created by media technologies, new at that time. In As far as In-Between the simple act of looking creates the work. At the border between the analog and the digital, exhibited in the white cube of a gallery but existing only through the presence of visitors, this installation already brought, at the time of its creation in 1992, a questioning on the transformation of the art market: what is original, or not? Where is the artistic product when the visitor is part of the work? All these questions, still relevant today, were already there.
On entering the gallery, into that room, the visitor lands in front of an easel, holding an lcd monitor, displaying an abstract image, consisting of a multi-layered RGB color space in permanent mutation. These transformations are combined with the live camera feed from the gallery space including one’s own silhouette, distorting the image. By paying attention, the visitor will notice that the color saturation of the image is fluctuating, as does the spatiality of the moving silhouette. Thanks to surveillance cameras placed inside and outside, it is the movement of the passer-by that influences the live stream of the lcd screen inside the gallery, while the movement of the visitor influences the virtual scenes outside the gallery.
The work does not simply generate the image in the here and now; rather, the visitor’s body produces multiple images in the system of multiple networked images, and this is made possible by the illusory world of light and shadow theater created by media technologies, new at that time. In As far as In-Between the simple act of looking creates the work. At the border between the analog and the digital, exhibited in the white cube of a gallery but existing only through the presence of visitors, this installation already brought, at the time of its creation in 1992, a questioning on the transformation of the art market: what is original, or not? Where is the artistic product when the visitor is part of the work? All these questions, still relevant today, were already there.
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