Syndicate: Krassimir Terziev: multiple shadows

[Lyubov Shtilianova <natfiz@bgcict.acad.bg> (by way of Andreas Broeckmann)]

K R A S S I M I R    T E R Z I E V


MULTIPLE SHADOWS



Description:

The installation consists of 6 layers/ 3 adjacent rooms.

Room 1. Projection on the wall - video loop: a peaceful landscape, panorama,
and the figure of a man (the author) standing with his back to the audience.
Silence. The figure turns slowly to face the audience and says, "Don't look
at me. The camera is working. Don't stand like that."

On the wall opposite the projection a surveillance camera is installed (the
parameter of the vision is that of the wall projection).

The camera transmits the image of the visitors in front of the projection
(landscape) to the next room on a video-beam projection on the wall. There
is another surveillance camera installed in Room 2 opposite the wall
projection that transmits the vision of Room 2 to the next room and so on.
Till Room 3. In this way the images are layered one over the other so the
visitor from the first room is already a projection on the wall of the 2nd
room but in the 3rd he is a projection of a projection and in the last image
it is not clear any more where the people in the image come from, who is
watching who, what is the original, and where multiplicity begins. The last
image is transmitted on the Internet site - a simulation of a police line-up
- accompanied with a text: "Point him out. Don't worry - they can't see you."


Concept:

The project "Multiple Shadows" is inspired by Bodriard's book "The Political
Economy of the Sign" and especially by the chapter named "Requiem of the
Media".

The installation quotes literally the basic formula of communication
transmitter-message-receiver, or encoder-code-decoder amplifying its power.
During the process of amplifying the message, thought as understandable and
univalent, is transformed into its opposite - ultimate ambivalence,
destroying the authority of the code.

The project investigates an area close to the concept of terror. The
presence of terror in the information society. The installation amplifies
the procedure of surveillance to the scale of ineligibility and absurdity.
The first visual material (the original) is the mediated reality
(mise-en-scene) - The Environment. The individual in this space appears to
be only a raw material for the instruments of social control, a pawn, a sign
within the many other signs in a system the main goal of which is its own
reproduction.

And in conclusion, quoting Bodriard again - a society which has become its
own environment.


Opening - Ata Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria - March 31, 1998
URL http://www.bol.bg/shadows
send your comments to Krassimir Terziev: natfiz@bgcict.acad.bg