At the invitation of IOMO Gallery in Bucharest, I collaborated with curator & visual artist Andrei Tudose, in bringing about a new body of work meant to bring together my research and experiments in optical contraptions and holography. I wanted to connect this to my other interests – scanography, hybrid film, contemporary dance and public activation. It sounds a little too much, doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t.
One of the very first things one comes in contact with while digging for information on holography is, in fact, what this medium is not. Neverendingly ironic, I thought, since it’s a medium that brings so many things together – photographic emulsions, optics, chemistry, laser technologies, even video for certain recording setups. It’s an image recording technology, yet this is the approach it is least used for. I wanted to play with the debates which surrounded the contemporary overlapping of holography with 3D projections, stereoscopy, or Pepper’s Ghost.
I’ve always disliked this kind of debates, but that doesn’t mean I am to look away. It just means I stumbled upon a new playground, so I decided to dive right into that, instead of using holography, as initially intended. I worked with the idea of misconception which materialized into a series of rather simple optical objects simulating certain 3D effects that one might associate with holography or lenticular imaging, while the objects’ main task was, in fact, to challenges the established way of interacting with art in a gallery setup: the visitor had absolute freedom as far as the exhibition structure was concerned. If an object was movable, the visitor would choose if/ where that objects should be exhibited. Some objects where extremely heavy, so the visitor had to be truly motivated to change its place. Some objects where quite light and small (and many), so they could even be bent into new structures or games.
Another piece in the play was the video series, which expanded from my previous experiments done through the first iteration of Faulty Technology – that is, digital video materialized using ink-based printers that went awry (and encourage them to go as far into glitch-mode as possible), frame by frame, layering through scanography and re-digitization of the analogued frames back into video.
