berlin

‘Surreal Business Cycle‘ was the first in my image & light installation series. I had been experimenting with the juxtaposition of video and printed images before, but for this project I combined them to create a sculptural piece that was literally made out of images, with a video at the core of the sculpture. Technically, ‘Surreal Business Cycle‘ is a 35 x 20 x 20 cm glass box that is almost entirely covered with semi-translucent images. A video screen is installed in the lower centre, in portrait format at a 45 degree angle, playing mostly split-screen stop-frame animation.

The concept of the piece is part of a bigger experimental narrative, which follows the trail of images and events that originated in the revisiting of a moment that originally took place in Barcelona, Spain, on the 22nd of September 2001 at 15:17:28 hrs. The ‘protagonist’, like a time traveler from the future, forensically examines the remnants and their visual surfaces of a time bygone, with a particular obsession for the currencies of ‘Old Europe’, found in a seemingly random manner on walls of cities across Europe and beyond.

The printed images form a collage of memories, snapshots of urban decay and fragments of a loose narrative, while the video illuminates the object from the inside, thereby creating a semi-translucent object that takes on different meaning depending on the angle of the observer.

© by Rupert Jaeger 2012

‘Surreal Business Cycle‘ was shown as part of the ‘Mnemonic City’ series. The exhibition took place in the Doomed Gallery, Dalston, London under the banner ‘Mnemonic City: Plato’s Cave’ with other work of 12 artists of Magma Collective.