Volkmar Klein’s Relative Realities is a remarkable, elegant, and profoundly engaging work of video art. (for description see this link) A one-liner, perhaps, in its simplicity of address, but an epiphanic one: for me the depth of absorption in the unfolding of temporal process makes it the standout so far of what I’ve seen at Filament. What makes the poetics of this work deeply moving is that it allows us to see time visibly subtracted, which I found resonating with the an inner sense of mortality, of the ends of all things. Sadly the sound composition which apparently reflects a mathematical model of the installation space fails to come through as it is masked by competing sounds from various other sources; as interesting as the program note makes it sound, it cannot be heard in any meaningful co-relation to the brilliant visual concept.
Definitely a great moment of the festival. After the first stage of pure enjoyment I started thinking how the synchronization between the image and the motion was made, sensors?, embedded accelerometer? micro controller? Well no, it works on the principles of the pendulum, a technology from 1602: "From its discovery by Galileo Galilei the regular motion of pendulums was used for timekeeping, and was the world's most accurate timekeeping technology until the 1930s"
ReplyDeleteI found that pretty amazing. The pendulum reminds us that the clock is nothing else than one model to understand the relation between the earth and the sun. It has in its very nature a spatial and temporal immensity.
The one critic that I want to make is the poor placement of this work. The sound scape was impossible to hear and once I read the site I understood that this was half of the piece, the tv moves on a virtual 3D space and collides with objects that we perceive only through sound, this materiality was completely lost. Also because in having the tv hovering above our heads a certain felling of danger was activated, not in an interesting way but rather in a cheap one.
More info about the piece:
http://www.volkmarklien.com/installations/rel_rea.html