Camp
2003 | 16:9 PAL, single channel projection, stereo, loop | 00:21:00
This work also relates to the analysis of slow camera movements. In this video the camera accomplishes a horizontal dolly through a former world war battlefield. Three identical bunkers camouflaged as houses blend into a modern recreational area. These are strategically situated in an area designed to function as a battlefield. Ironically, the landscape looks like it could still serve the military purpose it once had. Once built to shield one another, the bunkers now duplicate and mirror themselves, reiterating the principal purpose of gun turrets. In their different degrees of dilapidation, they are remnants of wartime ballistic events. In the video, the bunkers begin to appear as in a flip book animation.
In spite of the rapid motion in the foreground, no blurring occurs, which works against a naturalistic impression of depth of space. The technical procedure used to produce the slow-motion sequence generates intermediate pictures by calculating the direction of each pixel in relation to the following picture. Some elements of the foreground accompany the slowed-down background and pass by as sharp chunks in a jelly-like pixelization, whose relationship to foreground or background is undecided. Another group of objects is morphed into itself. These objects flow into the position which they assume in the following frame.
The peculiar dissolution of the space-time contingency forms a digitalized picture analogous to the pliancy of what is actually in the pictures, namely, the destroyed bunkers and the artificially formed landscape with respect to history.
Exhibition view from Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, 2003