Kinetic light installation
reflective foil, artificial resin, rotating motor, lights, plexiglass, light reflections
variable dimensions
A transparent picture is suspended on a rotating engine installed on the ceiling and is illuminated by two halogen projectors. It slowly rotates and projects moving, crystal-like light rays and veiled reflections. The fractal-like form on the plate is a computer-modified image of an X-ray scan of the author’s brain. The reproduction is two-sided, made of two types of material – one that reflects like a mirror, and another that enlarges like a magnifying lens, thus creating a condensation of light into a crystalline projection. The kinetic, multilayered spatial structure creates a virtual picture of membranous veils of light, which in the dissolving borders between the exterior and the interior, the projected and the reflected, metaphorically speaks of transitoriness, non-determination and the multidimensional spatial/time essence of every system, the sensible (natural or artificial) as well as the intelligible.
'The exploration of perception, states of consciousness and the recording mental or ‘cerebral’ landscapes with which Uršula Berlot has been working for a number of years now corresponds to the German concept Hyperplastik that E?ric Alliez and Elisabeth von Samsonow used to designate conceptual art that broadens the boundaries between perception, digitally generated or analogue images and ‘mental’ art. For Alliez and Von Samsonow this broad concept included, among other things, the Moscow neoavant-garde group Collective Action, the web-based and telepresence performances of Ken Goldberg, exploration of the total visual field within the Art and Technology programme in Los Angeles in the 1960s, but also experiments with consciousness, different mental states and the treatment of the medium (the mediator between the spiritual and real worlds in spiritualist se?ances) as a creative figure equal to the artist, which date back to the beginning of the 20th century and represent the main catapult for the development of surrealist automatic writing. What all these hybrid artistic forms have in common is conjecture and consideration of the function and role of the body and the brain in the comprehension of reality within the framework of and beyond sensuous reality, in other words the connecting of artistic creativity with creative discoveries and explorations in the sphere of cognitive science. Uršula Berlot’s work derives, on the one hand, from the observation of the action of the forces of gravity and materials and following the protocols dictated by coincidence, its inner order, its repeating patterns and the laws of chaos theory. At the same time, Uršula studies in her installations the behaviour, response and perception of the viewers in the exhibition space and encourages associative games with the help of the organic shapes produced by reflections of light through the compositions on transparent supports.
Included among the biomorphic forms for the first time are pre-planned compositions, some made on the basis of images of the artist’s brain with the help of magnetic resonance imaging. These shapes, Urs?ula says, associate with codes, schemes and diagrams that are a kind of score for kinetic projections of light. The moving reflections that create the effect of phantom limbs, produced by an unknown brain, are created in a purely analogue way.' – Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, 'Transitoriness' 2006 (exerpt)