Pulsation/Cross-sections
2007, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
Uršula Berlot
The spatial light installation Pulsation/ Cross-sections consists of a heterogeneous group of works. Their individual forms and content are transposed onto each other, translated, reproduced or reflected by various media, coming together to form an artificial, yet seemingly organic mental landscape. This spatial installation of light and video projections, transparent images on plexiglass and mirrored images set on aluminum supports come together to form a colorless and dematerialized landscape, which reflects cold, sharp and unusually harsh light, bringing together abstract, organic-like motives and immaterial elements such as reflections, projections and shadows.
The horizontal disposition of the works, crystalline and bio-amorphous in form, reflected in space with their elements projecting themselves onto each other, refers to nature, which in this artistic interpretation becomes unnatural, remote and utopian. The light installation creates a kind of game in balancing the tension between gravity and levitation, transposing the material into the immaterial, searching for the intelligible in the sensual. Rather than reproducing natural landscapes it manifests the energy-infused mental, immaterial yet nevertheless bodily-constituted organic topologies.
The video works and fractal compositions are formally based on an x-ray scan of the author’s brain, as these cerebral tissues in particular present a unique point of contact and the indivisible link between the organic body and the energy-level mentality. The central part of this installation consists of two video works that present a pulsating light phenomena, the bodily/organic and the technologically generated hybrid as a luminous apparition composed by layering reflected light, video projections of radiological scans of the artist’s brain and related manipulated recorded video images.
The installation is conceived to form a metaphoric space of dissimilative analogies in a string of optical light effects, mirroring relations and replications, thus constituting a challenge to expanded perceptional experience and allowing the viewer to create ever-changing, imaginary, entirely individual mental landscapes. The installation creates a floating, volatile, ephemeral space of fleeting illusions and incorporated apparitions, oscillating between spatial and temporal dimensions of perception and offering to the viewer an open frame for his/her interpretations, inter-connections, new connotations and expanded (self-)reflection.