David Claerbout came up with the idea for this interactive installation during an exhibition in Charleroi a number of years ago. The theatrical, the stage and the spectator were the starting points for this projection in which we see a man and a woman sitting on a terrace in front of a house. He looks statically ahead and she is drawing. When the visitor walks past a sensor this starts changing the image. The man nods to the woman and makes it clear to her that the spectator is looking at them. She turns around slowly, pencil between her lips, and looks at the spectator. After several seconds she turns her head back and starts to draw again. The man keeps staring passively into the distance. There is a special relationship between the two people expressed non-verbally by silent looks. By changing and abstracting the photographic account of the reality, Claerbout changes the characters into prototypes of mankind. Claerbout reconstructs this staged random picture and limits his intervention to a detail that the viewer at first hardly notices. By using digital techniques he gives the characters a cinematographic quality. Claerbout uses a video loop and the digital dynamics of the one interactive movement upsets the organized principal of the original image. In his previous work Claerbout often referred to the post-fascistic architecture 'Razionalismo' with its elegiac vision. Claerbout believes that we tend to doubt the authority and reality of the image so that we will feel easy about giving in to the enjoyment of artistic simulation.
– Erwin Nyboer |
David Claerbout, 1969, Kortrijk (België)
Woont en werkt in Antwerpen (België)
|
|
2 0 0 0 
