Rote Between the Lines
 
2011 / two 16mm loops

Diagonal lines scratched on 16mm film are projected onto two windows from inside a room. The lines gain a material quality by their refraction through textured glass or a translucent material covering the windows. Viewed from outside, the two loops of different lengths create an endless variation between the two frames of movement that are on their own apparent as mechanized repetition. Side-by-side, the two frames create the appearance of collusion and the lines seem to continue to exist beyond their projected frames.

In his treatise The Perception of Causality, Albert Michotte, a Belgian experimental psychologist, examined the eponymous phenomenon as a doorway to a more essential problem and offers experimental demonstrations of how it works and shapes our world. At the same time, Michotte went beyond phenomenology to suggest an ontology that finds itself right at home in cinema.  This installation was inspired by a passage that spoke of the movement of lines on a screen, which Merlot-Ponty discusses in his series of lectures, collectively titled The World of Perception:

...Albert Michotte from Louvain demonstrated that, if lines of light move in certain ways on a screen, they evoke in us, without fail, the impression of living movement. If, for example, two parallel vertical lines are moving further apart and one continues ton its course while the other changes direction and returns to its starting position, we cannot help but feel we are witnessing a crawling movement, even though the figure before our eyes looks nothing like a caterpillar and could not have recalled the memory of one. In this instance it is the very structure of the movement that may be interpreted as a 'living' movement. At every moment, the observed movement of the lines appears to be part of the sequence of actions by which one particular being, whose ghost we see on the screen, effects travel through space in furtherance of its own end. The person watching this 'crawling' will think they see a virtual substance, a sort of fictitous protoplasm, flow from the centre of the 'body' to the mobile extremities which it projects ahead of itself. Thus in spite of what mechanistic biology might suggest, the world we live in is not made up only of things and space: some of these parcels of matter, which we call living beings, proceed to trace in their environment, by the way they act or behave, their very own vision of things. ¹

1  Maurice Merlot-Ponty, The World of Perception, trans. by O. David (London: Routledge, 2008 [1948]), 57-58


Exhibitions

13.08.2011  Intricate Machines, presented by LaborBerlin @ Mica Moca (Berlin)
05.08.2011  Agora (Berlin)