TIDE is an audiovisual space related composition within which sound and image are treated equally. As sound and image operate in different dimensions the “sweet spot“ centred structure of the common audio-video formats is suspended.

Based on 9 song-like sound sketches a mesh of links and constellations is bound in which both affiliates affect each other alternately. In TIDE the common video format is divided and fanned out into the exhibition space by using tableau-like canvases as screens. The visitor is invited to migrate around these splinters and experience various views and spatial sound movements. Within the temporal course of the composition narrative fragments appear at different locations, spread, jump and disappear again.

For further information:
www.tide-composition.com

Documentation · 0:24 min. · Museum Glaskasten Marl | DE · 2009
(silent)

The image of a closed roller shutter was synthesized from 300 identical video sequences. The 12 seconds of the starting material are continuously visible in the composite two-dimensional image. Arranged adjacently, the microstructural elements of this image merge to create the impression of a solid, coherent object. Slight movements of the camera cause the roller shutter to sway, though hardly noticeably. The tiny light slits between the slats are not transparent. The picture space remains opaque.

Two video projectors project moving images onto 500 narrow strips of canvas which hang in the room to form a translucid, three-dimensional sculpture. At first the motifs are hardly recognizable, but then, little by little, shapes and movements work their way out of the fragmented picture space. Various vehicles, rows of buildings and people become visible and, no sooner have they appeared, vanish again into the maze of canvas strips.

The images used for the installation spalten have in fact been taken from the earlier video pieces CTG KEEPS COOL and Eigelstein. Both video pieces show everyday scenes of urban traffic. The images of a cargo ship ploughing its way up the River Rhine and a busy street scene with trains crossing one another in the background are digitally fragmented into vertical, intermeshing segments. For spalten the segments were meshed even closer together and rearranged. This segmentation of the images is further heightened by their projection onto the hanging strips of canvas, creating an iridescent urban fabric of almost physical solidity.

(Katharina Charpey)

Collaged images of architectural elements – such as bricks, grids or windows – are multiplied a thousand times over and projected onto nine orthogonally distributed screens. Swaying only slightly to begin with, they are soon pushing against one another, shattering like collapsing walls, now leaving our view free for the next wall, which likewise collapses. Mostly unnoticed, these everyday functional objects, now vastly multiplied, are here brought into the foreground and draw our attention to what is otherwise hardly given a thought. Thanks to the semitransparency of the screens, these microstructures of urban architecture are also projected onto the surrounding walls. Thus the natural boundaries of the room themselves become projection screens.

(Katharina Charpey)

The video ZOO is composed of a digitalized Super 8 mm film which has been recorded during the seventies in a Seaworld park in the US. It shows flowers, animal training, waterski acrobats and a high diver. Through the camera lens all living beings become objects of the viewers entertainment. During the process of digital editing the short, blurry and shaky shots are cut into smallest pieces, looped and rearranged in order to create a visual dramaturgy.

The shadow of the filmmaker is silhouetted against water surfaces moving in light and wind. Selected from a collection of more than 300 similar recordings in various locations, the video arranges 23 of these takes in a sequence to make up a visual composition.

The video projection of the installation Untergrund is perceptible only fragmentarily. Our view is obstructed by 18 square PVC foam sheets that are suspended from the ceiling by nylon threads and hover just over the floor. Like icebergs drifting in the ocean, they rotate with and against each other with every draught of air caused by the visitors in the room, thus constantly opening and closing spaces between them. It is through these temporary and ever changing openings that projectors, installed underneath the suspended sheets, project moving images onto the walls and the ceiling. Birds fly past, their black silhouettes standing out sharply against a diffuse, grey sky. Later the scene is reversed: white birds flit across a black sky like sparks flashing in a darkened room. Gradually, out of the darkness, searchlights wander aimlessly over the walls, their beams revealing details of an inside space but never showing it in its entirety. Thus the installation itself no longer serves as the projection surface on which the images appear. Indeed, it holds them back and makes visible only what can find its way out of the depths of obscurity.

(Katharina Charpey)

Documentation · 2:16 min. · TETEM | Enschede | NL · 2012
(Headphones recommended)

Two video projectors project a blue monochrome surface into the corner of a room. Three speakers are positioned on the ground just in front of it. A series of composed sounds can be heard at different spots in the room for a given period of time before fading away. There are crackling and crunching noises, giving the impression that a surface is breaking under great pressure. The crackling becomes drowned out by a sound similar to breathing, puffing or wind.

These spheres of sound disseminate and chase each other around the room, heavy and dominant, before becoming light and weak and dissolving into space. White lines similar to jet trails begin to appear in the blue surface. They then fade back into the monochrome blue of the projection. The white lines appear again but now there are more of them and they seem closely woven like spider webs or broken glass. A faint buzzing sound emanates from the speakers. At another spot in the room, a swarm of cymbal sounds begin to spread. Later the sound fades into silence. Undefined forms appear in the projection. But this time, they are in a state of constant vibration-like movement. Lines appear in the blue light but they remain vague; the eye of the observer wants to discern shapes, but they are too loose and nondescript.

The audiovisual spatial composition Der Schlaf & die Betäubung (Sleep & Sedation) depicts a distortion of perception. Auditory and visual elements emerge separately and detached as autonomous elements. There are known and unknown elements, foreign images, that create gaps in ones perception, which in turn, can be filled with personal interpretations.

In Eigelstein – the title is the name of a district of Cologne – the image of an urban situation disintegrates into narrow, vertical fragments. The contours of objects are atomized almost beyond recognition, such that the viewer’s focus of perception shifts away from the objects to the rhythm and coloration of the images. The process of fragmentation does not remain static, however, but changes continuously. The movements of vehicles and pedestrians modulate the time structure of the picture space: while they themselves join to form the uniform impression of an image, the other objects again dissolve into fragments.

The loop begins with the image of a young couple sharply silhouetted against the backdrop of an idyllic beach. The mood changes abruptly as a wave threatens to inundate the camera that is filming the scene from a low angle on the ground. The monotonous movements of the waves in the background contrast with the linear, narrative movements of the couple. Alternating play directions of the film repeat the upward and downward motions of the ocean: starting out from the temporal midpoint of the scene, namely the breaking of the wave, the footage runs further forwards and further backwards such that the advanced and retarded images are successively visible. It is in this context of “before and after” that the mood of the scene changes in relation to the starting moment.