Video installation and interactive video installation
Metro station Südtirolerplatz, Vienna (AT), in the context of the exhibition topographie II: Untergrund (Wiener Festwochen festival)
Video installation: video projector, video recorder, videotape, construction site safety fence. Interactive video installation: video projector, computer-controlled laser disc, computer, sensors, live camera
In co-production with Gudrun Bielz
The subway is no place to linger. People rush to the trains, and to the exits. The motion space is the space between the incidents: The Space Between. Space 1 is a video site installation: a vertical video projection onto the ground shows a simulated construction site. The projection simulates a hole in the floor that opens the view to another spatial level. Deep down, an airplane flies, it is burning; water splashes. Space 2 is an interactive video installation in the pedestrian tunnel: its content is influenced by the flow of pedestrians. They are detected on their way to the trains through sensors placed in designated zones. The speed and direction of the video sequences are controlled by the number of pedestrians, their velocity and the direction of their walking movements. Depending on the type of movement, the observers "produce" different "projection environments". Train arrivals take place twice: once in reality on the platform
and once in the pedestrian tunnel, transmitted live and moving directly towards the viewer.
Images
The Space Between 1 and 2 refers to a concrete architectural space, a first and second level inside the subway station. But 1 and 2 are equally imaginary anchor points in a network of coordinates that has no borders. In the “video construction site”, a deep shaft opens up the space vertically; one floor below, a horizontal pedestrian tunnel leads to illusory spaces. The images of the projected virtual spaces paraphrase and subvert the architecture of the subway […]. In the real tunnel below, the observers themselves – as interfaces – control shape the views into cliché spaces of a collective fantasy through their interaction. […] At fixed intervals reality catches up with the travellers once again, when the incoming train – transmitted live via camera – traverses the scenery.
Silvia Eiblmayr, in: Die Topographie des Untergrunds [translated from the original German]
Exhibitions:
1991, Topographie II: Untergrund – Videoinstallationen in der Wiener U-Bahn, öffentlicher Raum, Wien (AT)
Bibliography:
=> Eiblmayr, Silvia: Die Topographie des Untergrunds. Publiziert in: Wiener Festwochen (Hg.): topographie II: Untergrund - Videoinstallationen in der Wiener U-Bahn, Wien 1991Schnell, Ruth: On the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia 1995, Wien 1995
Weibel, Peter (Hg.): The Media Pavillon. Art and Architecture in the Age of Cyberspace. Austria, Biennale di Venezia, Wien 1995
Weibel, Peter (Hg.): Jenseits von Kunst. Passagen Verlag, Wien 1997