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Place: HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund
Date:
Artists: Isabella Fürnkäs Lukas von der Gracht
Works: Selfiecalypse
Isabella Fürnkäs and Lukas von der Gracht stage a hunt through urban space in a hybrid adaptation of a gameplay mission and smartphone selfie with a well-chosen setting and carefully devised costumes. Both the gray concrete parking garage backdrop and the first-person shooter garb and face-paint work as stylization devices: respectively as a fashionable setting of contemporary culture and as an attempt to approximate the smooth sterility of video-game animation aesthetics. While it normally takes a lot of effort to render virtual-reality aesthetics that are accurate with regard to the facts of material reality (that is, artificially generating an illusion of the world inside the museum), the material reality aesthetic here seems to be seeking the illusion of an animated (that is, virtual, not actual) referent. And on this level, finally, the parking garage together with the pacing camera inside of it are ultimately a metaphor, in which two protagonists chase each other and move through a self-contained space that is like a Möbius strip – a bubble or capsule, as if it had no exterior. The split-screen projection from the smartphone cameras is an interesting update of the closed-circuit thematic of conceptual filmmakers of the 1960s and ’70s ; their camera, posed as both a mirror and a competing reality, has now become a facet of everyday life.
- Text by Susanne Titz