Interactive computer video installation
University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT)
Behind the computer-animated door is the "direct video transmission" of what is happening outside, the place where the viewer is coming from. At the same time, the window in the same large-screen projection shows a past situation: mounted time-lapse video recordings taken at night from the same camera angle. Apparently, the viewer masters the central perspective: by walking forward she/he triggers the opening of the projected door. The catwalk keeps the viewer in line with the projected event. A simultaneous presentation, the relativity of the present and the past, the real and the projected, is staged in the installation.
Simulated architecture, a traditional element of art since the Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerism, is advanced into media-specificity. The media as doubling machines increase the realism and the trompe l'oeil through the moving image.
"Seeing and movement as dynamic processes that take place in space are the subject of the “door” projects Tür, 1988; Tür für Huxley, 1989; Tür für Heine, 1990 – a series of related computer and video installations in which Ruth Schnell works with the electronic simulation of architectural passageway situations (doors, windows, stairs). Upon approaching the door simulated by the video, observers find themselves in the paradoxical situation of being both in front of and behind the camera, simultaneously the object and the subject of representation."
- Ruth Schnell, quoting Johanna Hofleitner