Video
Videotape for one screen, 60 min., sound
By using the own body as interface, the video work montréal2000 (created in the year 2000) gives continuity to the artistic strategy of implementing new forms of perception by intertwining real and virtual spaces of action.
In Schnell´s installations Body Scanned Architecture or Gegen die Zeit the human body and its movement in space were projected onto architecture or respectively onto an architectural assemblage, and here the entanglement of the action spaces was determined by the distortion of the body projection due to the wireframes of the real or virtual architecture. In montréal2000 a movie that is being played on TV is reflected on the face of the artist. The acting bodies - protagonists of an encrypted porn film on a pay channel - remain hidden. The video was shot in a hotel room in Montreal.
In montréal2000, the fascination of the duplication of film in film, screen in screen, becomes the starting point for a complex chain of perspectives, of conceptual, real, and virtual spaces. Such as: hotel room, hotel room porn, viewing, filming yourself while viewing and releasing this film again to be watched by someone else. The uni-directional movement from the intimate to the public space is thwarted: Since Schnell avoids the pay-channel principle, she gets to see a disturbed picture, one to assemble yourself. It would also not undisturbed be her taste. As such, the film remains hidden from the viewer.
- Ruth Schnell, quoting Patricia Köstring in: Triebwerk magazine, No. 2, Vienna 2001