Fragile Territories
Installation [2012]
Novmenber 7 2012 - January 6 2013
Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France
Four powerful white laser beams draw a floating white object on a thirty meter wide and six meter high wall in a completely dark hall, slowly evolving shapes, edges and curves of shimmering, pulsating light.
Sometimes the shapes are barely visible, sometimes they explode into extreme brightness. In some sequences the quality of the light is steady, during other times it fluctuates and breaks apart into scintillating particles. Sounds - transformed recordings of a low piano keys and tiny high pitched mechanical noises - fill the room, sometimes in sync with the visual aspects and sometimes running simply in parallel.
Whilst everything is floating and happening in rather long intervals, a constant black shadow is moving in front of the projection, from left to right, every 4.2 seconds, like a giant blade of a windmill, a negative object that contrasts the bright projection by muting it where it appears. It is not only obscuring the image but also dampening the sounds at its current position and emitting a low frequency noise itself. A dark strong force that puts the rest in an infinitely distant background.
The visual and the auditive component are created in realtime using statistic and stochastic algorithms. As a result, the duration of the work is infinite and it never repeats. Due to the complex nature of the code and its embedded randomness, it is quite impossible to predict future states. However, additional rules within the program ensure that the installation cannot 'explode' or 'fade away' but instead always swings back into a more or less stable state after it reaches certain boundaries.
