2014
Installation
Black window blind, projector, radio receiver, computer
50 × 86 × 70 in.
traum began with an ordinary window blind. By chance, I saw a sharp stripe of sunlight cut through the slats into a room. The sensation was intense and stayed in my body like a touch. Almost at once, what I knew about light and how images form rushed in to explain it, and the explanation erased the trace the sensation had left. The work tries to hold on to that brief, bodily feeling before knowledge replaces it.
A projector, carefully mapped to the blind, casts light through the gaps between its slats, visualizing sound received from a radio in real time. Strips of white tape on the surrounding surfaces are aligned with the lines of light that fall through the slats onto the floor, so that fixed physical marks and passing light share the same edges. The stripes of light that once came by chance from the sun are rebuilt here from a signal that cannot be seen.
The installation asks viewers to stay with it over time, attending to small changes between moments. Along the way they pass through states close to agnosia, the inability to recognize objects, sounds, and shapes: an uncertain sense of one’s own body, and a confusion in which parts of the virtual space seem to belong to the real one. Rather than delivering an event, the work lets viewers step aside from it and encounter it again from a temporal distance.
