ALEXANDER HAHN

electronic media artist

Video

FUNDAMENTALS OF LEGERDEMAIN

(1992, synchronized computer animation on 5 stripped TV tubes, sound)   


Part of the installation cycle The Kircher Itinerary, Fundamentals of Legerdemain consists of 5 TV tubes stripped bare, each displaying a segment of the studio of Caspar David Friedrich. Digitally transformed, the romantic painter's space simultaneously hosts events with normally different durations: the erosion of a stone head, the trickling of sand between floorboards, the snapping of a Luna brand rat trap, rounds of the cups and ball game, a pick-pocket scene in Rome ...


“Five naked TV tubes simulate a kind of memory chamber in the form of a space consisting of computer-animated elements. The top monitor shows a fluttering flag. On the middle one a stone head is imperceptibly crumbling into sand. Just before it has disappeared completely into a crack in the ground, a trap snaps shut, flying form the left-hand to the right-hand monitor. At the same moment the head appears again. Simultaneously with this, a short sequence replaces the image of the flag: are we seeing a pickpocket's rapid movements here? Before we can take it all in, the image of the flag returns and the bottom monitor is showing the three little cups used in the famous confidence trick. A ball is hidden under one of them, and you can never guess where. Memory is tricked, perception taken by surprise and time passes in a rush or infinitely slowly. The installation's rhythmically interlinked images contrast imperceptible time sequences: the process of geological decay and the fleeting quality of a moment.”


http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/fundamentals-of-legerdemain/