Central location of the 10th Mapping Festival edition - Geneva’s key event within digital arts field -, the exhibition space of Le Commun offered an astonishing and immersive venture through a set of installations dedicated to floating and oscillating lights experiences, whether intense or more spectral.
When entering the immaculate white room where sits the monolith Lightscape VII by dutch artist Matthijs Munnik, we can immediately feel the significance of the experience. Inspired by immersive and psychedelic environments releasing high potential of pulsating lights emitted in flickers way – intense flashing lights creating retinal visual effects -, like the ones invented by beat generation artists Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville in early 1960’s with their Dream Machine, Lightscape VII mostly refers to famous Dream House concept imagined by minimalist musician LaMonte Young. Here, the hallucinogenic diffusion of lights proceeding from the massive and rectangular object quickly endorses chromatic fluctuations, sweet and sharp at the same time, going from green to orange, from pink to purple, strongly meditative in their refined variations, but boosted by sound drones stressing out the physical approach of inner perception.
Contrasted oscillations
If Matthijs Munnik’s work is recurrent in this domain, with his set of sound and lights virtual windows named Citadels, this new device finds between walls of Le Commun, exhibition space located at the heart of Geneva’s MAMCO (Musée d’Art Contemporain) and central location of Mapping Festival, a very operating frame. Indeed, all the other installations exposed revolve around comparable light oscillations principles, varying only by their mechanical impact, more or less intense or spectral.
For instance, the contrast is striking between Lightscape VII and the installation located in the immediate previous room. Playing with its much more dark environment, showing perfectly the choreographic lights aspects of the piece, dutch artist Gabey Tjon a Tham’s))))) Repetition At My Distance concentrates a field of 16 rotating vertical blue light wires that oscillate in spreading patterns. As Lightscape VII, the work shares the same effects of retinal persistence but in a context far more gloomy. Here, light oscillations evoke more strenuously natural phenomenon: wind passing through trees, spontaneous move of dancers turning on themselves, etc.
Sitting at crossroads of all installations, swiss artist Benjamin Muzzin’s Full Turn is in accordance with this minimalist logic by diffusing light in a weird optical exercise on a reduced scale. The support of the piece is composed of two screens placed back to back, creating a three-dimensional animated sequence that can be seen at 360 degrees unlike any other type of screens. Real kinetic sculpture, Full Turn gives the impression to dive deeply into a frenetic mechanism of virtual screws and pistons intertwining with each other. In spite of its small scale, the installation seems to endorse the role of central gyroscope irradiating on the whole exhibition, its heart-box on a certain way, between the pieces the most intensely expressive and the ones playing more with a ghostly feeling.
Highlight Void
In the first category, The Void, from Russian multidisciplinary collective Tundra, transcends the concept of spatial nothingness through rotational motion of an audiovisual flux, reminding sometimes technological modulations from circular installations of Quebecker Luc Courchesne. Drawing its aesthetic from the infinity of outer space, with its shining stars filling the ring-screen like thousand eyes, the installation enhances the original stillness by loop moves that transform it into an epicentre of visuals phenomenon, graphic waves and sound throbs. It features effects of torsion that change stars setting into fluctuant lines, pivoting spirals, taking the eye in a sensual ballet of abstract forms.
All the opposite of Christian Delécluse’s Inner Space, that connects with more restrictive, more confined dimension of a material void embodied in a – both subjective and real -darkroom box. Performing like fluorescent beams levitating in obscurity, the unpredictable move of neon tubes driven by a very low-tech counterweight mechanism unfolds a spectral choreography of tubular lights, sliding to the rhythmical noise of its gearwheels. A way to express differently this notion of transmitter, of threshold between two worlds, that light occupies in its original spatial dimension, and that the whole exhibition conveys to different sensible configurations, from the most expansive to the most introverted one.
Laurent Catala
Mapping Festival
www.mappingfestival.com