installations

UNTITLED
(New York>Bergen>Budapest)
[2000]

4-channel interactive video installation.

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A New York video Image (orange) a Bergen Image (blue) and a Budapest Image (green) interact on an upright video image that is shaped identical with the windows of the gallery space. (The actual gallery windows are blacked out) New York and Bergen are pre-recorded, Budapest is a live image: A video camera films the view of the window closest to the wall projection.
The three images are also shown individually on three flat LCD monitors mounted on the adjacent wall. The main wall projection is a collage of all three images. The video feeds run into a video mixer with a "luminance key" function. The live image (Budapest) is becomes the mask for the other two images. Its movements (cars, pedestrians, trees) determind how much Budapest and how much New York is made visible. The dark parts of the Budapest image are showing New York, the lights parts are showing Bergen.The viewer can follow the way the collage is asselbled on the three individual monitors.

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This is the second installation from the series “city projections".
The aim of this work is creating a visual connection bewteen three cities.
The choice of location was determined by the living places of the participating artists in this group show - New York, Bergen and Bidapest. The work shows a conglomeration of three visions shaped in three different countries, cultures and climate zones. Each image shows a street scene. The Bergen and the New York images were pre-recorded a week earlier and now paired with a live image in Budapest. Both show a small tag on the outer edge with date and time, evoking the (false) simultaneity of web cams. In opposition to “live” images on the web, these images are live transmissions that posses -relatively speaking- just a bit of a longer time delay (or refresh rate) than that of a web cam.
Like a jig saw puzzle the video mixer now assembles a construction of this three different city images.
In order to distinguish the images (all images interact with each other) a strong color tint was applied to them. The choice of color refelcts the climate zone, Bergen with a cold blue tint , New York in warm sunlight -orange tint. Budapest, the only "live" image is produced with a camera with night vision ability, which let it appear in green. (the color is produced buy the night vision filter).

The huge windows of the gallery had round arcs. This shape was were echoed in the shape of the video screen. The patchwork of the colored images evoke a familiar shape in these romanic architecture: colored glass in-lays of a church window.