It’s easy to forget that all video is illusion, a matter of perspective. In 2013’s Simulacra, Germany-based artist Karina Smigla-Bobinski, images seem to merge directly from light in the eyes of the viewer, pulled from space into being by magnifying glasses suspended from the ceiling. Even an element as basic as focus, then, is game for artistic manipulation.
Her materials are basic – think monitors and a splitter. But in this as in her other works, physical materiality is a common theme, playing with mapping and light, but also toying with space and objects. It’s interesting in this case that she leaves the jumble of cords intentionally exposed (which is not necessarily the case with all her work). That can look a bit raw, but at least here it reveals what people are seeing.
The project premiered at Sonica Festival, in Ljubjana, Slovenia. (The tagline for that event is, suggestively, a “Festival of Transitory Art.”)
Artist statement:
Video art and technique is nothing new, but Karina Smigla-Bobinski used this to play with our seeing sense. She withdraw the flood of images from the medium and lays the true nature bare: light. She does that with a analogue change in the technical order of digital imagesystems, and repositions the virtuality back into the viewers head, making it an organic, analogue mental cinema.
http://www.smigla-bobinski.com/english/works/SIMULACRA/
Via the Contemporary Art in East Europe blog
