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LINEMENT
2008 – ongoing
computer generated video
duration, depending on the screen size, from 12’52 to 21’20 min (loop),
b/w, no sound
I synthesize the image from footage that I take myself or I program it. Most of the time, I work with my own visual element, LINEMENT — a stripe of light that moves against a black background. For each new exhibition space, the rhythm and proportions of this video element are re-adjusted. Initially, I only showed LINEMENT on CRT monitors. That was important because of the way CRT monitors work, with light literally poured outwards. I made several site-specific installations, ORNAMENT, using CRT monitors, lining up at first four and then fourteen monitors vertically, in a column, and then horizontally, in a line which was infinitely reflected by mirrors completely changing and overpowering the exhibition space. I wanted to develop this result of transformation and interaction further, and I began to use projection and video mapping when working with LINEMENT, to engage architectural forms as projection screens.
To LINEMENT I have turned again and again, sometimes transforming it into a material object or bringing it back to video reality, but in a new quality. Although it lacks lexical meaning, LINEMENT is akin to a canonical text organized according to the principle of musical structure. Its dogmatically sequential system of signs does not convey a specific meaning but brings to understanding on a sensual, pre-linguistic level.
LINEMENT is a basic video element in a series of site-specific installations with a common title ORNAMENT. In this series of installations, a space is redefined by embedding in it one and the same video element – a luminous white line which passes through the image plane in a given rhythm. Depending on architectural space the number of monitors displaying this element can vary from one to fourteen or more. The element, which creates a constantly changing ORNAMENT, is a tangent to the imaginary circle described around the center of the monitor. Starting the movement from a point on this circle, the line moves through its center. With each new motion cycle the line changes its position, turning 1.8 degrees, and gradually describes a full circle.
Due to this consecutive change of the movement trajectory, the outline of the ORNAMENT on the screen is constantly changing. Thus the image of the ORNAMENT is being constructed not only in space and time, but also in the viewer’s perception. The installations ORNAMENT do not decorate the architectural environment, but open it up to another dimension.
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