White walls, shiny floor, electric power distribution, two pieces of loudspeakers and eleven projectors producing eleven identical video loops. Two rooms filled up with a mixture of darkness, lights of the screened images and a still flow of thoroughgoing sound of noise. Two Swiss artists Christine Camenisch (1956) and Johannes Vetsch (1956) used a video loop capturing a real scene to visually transform the gallery walls, besides this most often used strategy to realize their projects they also use puristic geometrical light projection. The sequence captures a macro shot of a medieval paper mill wheel from Basel over which the water runs down and shatters into drops. This simple scene is being furthermore manipulated in order to be visually and later on conceptually confronted. The picture in the entrance hall is rotated 180 degrees and thus the water flows horizontally along the walls, the wheels run against the viewer and the space is filled with muffled sound of Johannes Vetsch music, a combination of Tokyo subway train noise and occasional piano tones. Intentional pauses in between projections, realized by white pillars protruding from the walls, can be perceived as local specific elements representing Zlín functionalist architecture. Act Two in the next room has the form of a contemplative climax where the sequence is returned to its natural position and the music is practically inaudible.

Effervescence, as the Swiss artists call their environment, is thus a place of paralysis, a place of traumatic sublimation - a process where the viewer at first goes through a sharp emotional and also physically stunning response to a surprising visual show and in the following phase the experience is being rationally reflected. What the authors make us face in the first minutes is a portrait of monumentality and chilling detachment of metaphysical inevitability. They push us to instinctively use the dismayed anthropocentric perspective, they get us to tremble with horror from a monotone and neverending horizontal sequel and finally in the next room we breathe a sigh of relief on the wave of transcendental verticality. In the relative silence of the second act, at the moment of an illusive enclosure of the semantic structure, a new object introduces itself into the horizon of our attention. As a matter of fact it is quite unimportant whether the authors work with this phenomenon knowingly or it has just generated itself based on the technological support of the whole video installation. Essential is that if the viewer notices it, its way is not over yet.

Just listen to the quiet buzz of the projector cooling fans and have a look ꞌbehindꞌ the scene that is repeatedly provided to us and you will see a fascinating technological ecosystem of eleven projectors, electricity distribution, plugs and loudspeakers placed into sterile industrial space. This ecosystem, living its own paralel life, ignores the human beings wondering around. Despite, this object was brought over to cooperate by the artists and thus influences our lives in a fundamental way. Within the intentions of object oriented ontology theory the anthropologic perspektive does not know how to deal with this concurrence and thus the result might for example be that the most concentrated viewers get into a surprisingly freeing point where they stop being interested in themselves entirely.

text: Martin Drábek