PLASMA 13/05, 18-channel video installation,
duration: 2:00 min, infinite loop, videostill

Art conceptualizes itself here consciously as a service industry, offering an alternative approach to design. This work takes into account the VEAG building's status as an integral business centre and its location in a busy street. The five vertical and 13 horizontal window/wall-segments, doubling as video screens, partition the facade and form a near-autonomous L-form. Rhythmic, optical impulses are emitted from top to bottom, left to right. Individual images run at intervals, wave-like, from window to window.

The background, initially dark, is shot through by a glowing, red ray. Before this ray reaches the last window, spherical forms emerge as eruptions of the light impulse. The last surge makes these fireballs glow blue, before transforming them into masses of a metallic appearance which assume new forms with every new wave of energy. The process is governed by the lineal order of a serial form, which rotates on its own axis. An unending loop of the film possesses a further dramatic element. Towards the end of the loop segment a consonance arises between the forms and with it a resonance which finally brings the energy current to a halt.

The images then disappear, only to re-emerge from the void shortly afterwards and launch a new act of creation. The dynamic image sequence stimulates an array of associations with, among other things, various functions of the building. The activities of VEAG as a producer of electricity are placed in the context of energy as a universal, cosmic principle of life... Although on closer inspection the creation act reveals itself as a banal game. Evolution exhausts itself in quotes and sensationalism.

Text: Joachim Penzel (Translation: Anna Usborne)

PLASMA 13/05, 18-channel video installation, duration: 2:00 min, loop, installation view Chausseestrasse Berlin, Germany, 2000