Please, Don´t Touch
Markus Huemer & Michal Pustějovský
02.06. – 26.06.11
With this exhibition our gallery carries on with the concept based on double exhibitions of professors with their students. This time it is Markus Huemer, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, with his student Michal Pustějovský, who created a presentation together.
Exhibition area called Black Box is a dark, black painted room. On one of its white walls there is a white place which serves as a projection screen. These white projection screens correspond with white walls of the White Cube, which is a traditional architecture used for exhibitions of non-media art. To be precise, they are background for the White Cube, walls of the White Cube, a screen for art projection.
In installations “Carcere (01)” and “Carcere (02)” it is the other way round. A projection screen is not a place in the Black Box but in the White Cube. So the projection screen is not white but black and therefore it serves as background for the Black Box exhibition architecture. White twinkling light is projected onto these screens. The Black Box is mentioned here, but its traditional “modus operandi” is turned inside out. The source of images is generated by a computer program and it reminds of simple image quivering.
The name “Carcere” refers to the series of copperplate engravings of the same name made by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. His surrealistic architectonic scenarios turn towards infinity and suggest the limited possibility of escaping space. Piranesi’s obscure world of architecture is compared with program architectures of the media world. Infinite sequence of graphic areas in the form of image quivering symbolizes the automatism included in both architectures.
Text by M. Huemer
What is more real? A shadow of an object or the object itself? Can the digital world overlap with the real world? How can we perceive and distinguish one from another? What will such encounter be like?
Installation Experimental Object No.1 and No.2 tries to answer these questions through a retroactive experiment which gave a rise to the previous installation. By creating two identical objects, different possibilities of interaction are tested as well as the existence of a copied object itself. Flow-around, deformation or direct collision are consequences of us perceiving a newly created situation.
Motivated by greed for knowledge, we keep bombarding our surroundings. Nothing within our reach will escape our interest, no matter if in real or virtual space. Compared to the world we are living in, the virtual world has a great advantage, as the cognitive tools are already preset and fully automated. This advantage also offers the possibility to change rules arbitrarily and adjust them to one’s liking. However, they are true only seemingly, so please don’t touch.
Text by M.Pustějovský