Small Spectacle. Video Installations by Lauri Astala
Location: 5th floor, Gallery of Contemporary Art
Lauri Astala’s artistic production is comprised mainly of sculptures, videos and computer-aided video installations, which deal with the topics of concepts and experience of space, and the cultural structures that form and frame them.
In this exhibition, Astala presents three video installations: “Apropos of Seeing”, “Small Spectacle about Image-Semblance” and “Small Spectacle about Lightness”. All of them, in one form or another, break the reality of the traditional cinematic black cube, where the outside world becomes an absent reference, mediated by the moving image.
Furthermore, Astala’s installations break down the traditional division between the film (or artwork) and its audience, in which the role of the spectator is limited to that of a passive observer. Astala wants the spectator to be an active part of the work, thus making visible the spectator’s here-and-now in contrast to the other place, other time that artworks and cinematic images traditionally present. The works reflect the threshold between the real and the virtual. They also evoke questions of presence and absence in connection with contemporary technological environments, and the transformation that has taken place in our experience of space, a transformation of reality into “image-like.”
Apropos of Seeing (2008) is an interactive, computer-aided video installation. The projection of the installation mixes real-time video images from the gallery/exhibition space with film material shot elsewhere (Palazzo Corsini, Rome). Thus the spectator is integrated visually as a part of the cinematic narrative – as if he were himself inside the movie, as an actor in the film.
The work raises questions of the spectator’s position. What is he looking at: the film, himself, his own gaze …? What is the location of the spectator: the space of the performed work (gallery/exhibition space), Palazzo Corsini, the virtual space of the film …?
Small Spectacle of Image-Semblance (2005) dissolves the border between space and image. It creates a sensation of instability and uncertainty, a faltering sense of presence. The work consists of a stereogram video animation projected on three walls of a cubic space and a text (a quotation from Jorge Luis Borges) stretched on a steel wire in the middle of the space. Focusing on the text while reading it, the spectator’s eyes are adjusted perfectly, matching the stereographic pattern on the video. The stereographic video causes the walls to undulate. The room is thus perceived as an unstable and hallucinatory space.
Small Spectacle of Lightness (2005) is a single channel video (5-minute loop), projected on a back wall of a corridor-like space. The video shows a room with two windows. After a while, the spectator starts to doubt his eyes, until he realizes that the room is slowly moving, constantly changing shape. In fact, images of different rooms are morphed non-linearly through each other. The spectator identifies himself with the “real” scale of the video image, and the slow movement creates the floating, amoebic and hallucinatory sensation of an unstable space.
