VOLUME I, HD-Video transfered to Blu-ray disc, silent, 8:27 min, loop, installation view Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, Germany, 2008 (Photo: Thomas Wucherpfennig)

VOLUME I is based on raw material of the creative industry, which is offered in the internet to be ordered and processed in large numbers, chiefly by graphic designers. The unusual manner of employing these image banks reveals the artificiality with which every second piece of printed paper attempts to attract our attention. Conventionally, the digitilized photographs are cut-up, spiced with fragments of text, adjusted chromatically, disected, and then recombined before being rereleased into the visual world as idealised messages.

All of the images used in VOLUME I are left unaltered. They are ordered according to formal aspects, such as colour, form, contrast and compositional categories such as architecture, landscape, figure etc. As such, no significantly new aspect emerges in the ordering of the mountain pile of found images. Rendered as a type of review of the visible world, their encyclopedic character is highlighted. The extremely rapid succession of, originally individual, photographic images, and the way they are assembled causes them to reveal their nature for the first time. The individual image functions as an archetypical representation of an entire existential reality. The distillation of an essence and its subsequent heightening turn the representational image into a symbol. The observer is exposed to an optical rapid-fire of beauty, strength and suggestive truth. The flashes of light act directly on the body; the eye needs time to acustom itself. The mad rush of images is reminiscent of the view from a high speed train in full career, when people, trees and objects show themselves like mental flashes for a fraction of a second before vanishing instantly, against the backdrop of the passing landscape.

Each image is embedded within the series of preceeding and succeeding images, suggesting a scenic progression. Calmer, comparatively harmonic image-sequences, generated by combining images with similar compositional structures and chromatic range, are juxtaposed against strobe-like sequences, in which complementary forms, colours and contents alternate at shorter intervals.

VOLUME I invokes an association with dream images. The work is of a purely optical character, it appeals to the sense of sight, excluding aucustic influences. A high speed ride through supposedly metaphysical images, permitting the viewer to compare what he/she has consciously or unconsciously seen elsewhere with the stream of images on the screen, imitating the state of "rapid eye movement". It is not necessary to close your eyes in order to give yourself over to your daydreams; the images move of their own volition. The clichées seek their context in the inner world of the observer, thus emancipating themselves from their intended function. They comment on themeselves mutually and begin perhaps at some point to consume eachother.

Text: Thomas Rabisch (Translation: Steven Black)

VOLUME I, HD-Video transfered to Blu-ray disc, duration: 8:27 min, infinite loop, still image sequence