text by Hanan Benammar
2018
A text written about HC Gilje´s installation lysfanger nr1 at Atopia kunstlab nov 2017.
The image is spinning and spinning. The lights draw unexpected lines across the room. The camera is visible twice, for less than a second. The room becomes a box, an abstract space, an abstract space of reflection, of lights; of shadows and thoughts.
HC Gilje turned his orbital camera into the room, capturing the light from outside for a duration of 24h and I am now turning my orbits out of the space, filtering images of the video in my head, gathering memories of our conversation.
Sitting still for several hours, I become part of the invisible. Just another object in the room absorbing lights and shadows. The human perspective being alienated, as humans are not thought as the main protagonists thus enhancing the sense of space, I sit alone in that same space for an undetermined period of time. Sit, think, observe and write about lysfanger nr.1, as a sort of documentation of the documentation, making my intervention near-obsolete.
I am facing the back of the monitor. An empty and cold room, observing the street across the black rectangle.
Prior to my bodily presence, the robotic eye (also called camera) was sitting here for full rotation of the Earth and surveilling the streets, gathering thousands of pictures in an indeed robotic or universal objectivity with 1 still image every 25 second: without filters, criterias, preferences or “human like” prejudices.
The 3275 pictures were stitched together at the speed of 30 images a second, which mathematically - or magically - leave us with a compressed time of 3 min.
Although it might seem a lot, it turns out that our own visual systems (also called eyes) move 100 000 times a day, 3 times a second. The comparison between eye and camera has been and will be done a lot, but our eyes are not working like a camera. Or at least, not like a traditional camera. Just as part of our brain is anticipating the movement of our eyes, Gilje’s camera follows an algorithm, creating a rigorous digital itinerary across the landscape, yet seemingly illusive.
With its 3 min span, lysfanger nr.1 creates a duration that is too short to grasp and in which the loop finds all its meaning in the potentiality to re-attempt entering a narrow yet infinite space and define the glimpse as an existential glitch where we are left with our human finite and derisory time span.
If lysfanger nr.1 was a digital relic of our times, with all brief informations on our world or outside that same window to start with: our body in movement, middle class housings, a few trees, a gloomy light rising and fading, darkness; this piece would be a poetic and melancholic manifest of our obsolescence, yet worth living.
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