![]() |
| ||
| NEWEST TRENDS . SEARCH . BUY . JOIN . COLLECT . RESEARCH . READ . DISCUSS | |||
|
Indepth Arts News: "Eric Lanz - Jogging" 2005-01-27 until 2005-03-30 Saint-Gervais - Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine Geneve, , CH
His first works fall into the electronic experiments in new fiction that appeared in the early 1980s. This new
fiction worked according to a logic of association that is comparable to the kind found in music and poetry.
In 1990 he began the series Les Matières (Materials), Les Outils (Tools), Les Gants (Gloves), and Les Gestes
(Gestures), in which the screen becomes the locus of an inventory. The artist records, enumerates, classes,
and compares bodies and materials with a feigned rigor while being guided by his own subjectivity.
Current interactive procedures (select, shift, manipulate) are the subject of a second inventory. Here Lanz
explores and presents several types of selection processes, for example, the touch
screen, or the voice as a tool for giving commands.
In his new piece called Jogging, which he created for his show at the Center for
Contemporary Images, Lanz invites us to take over the direction of a story that
develops on three screens in succession. A man with a bag in hand is seen walking
hesitantly along a path in an initially urban, then residential environment.
Eventually he pushes deeper and deeper into an increasingly dense and oddly regular
forest. The aim of his walk remains mysterious and of secondary importance.
The viewer must regularly press a button in order to continue navigating through the
story. Although playful and indispensable to getting the story to advance, the
viewer’s gesture has only limited importance. It only influences the space-time of
the film’s editing in fact since the images are predetermined by the artist.
The installation keeps us then in a deceptive relationship vis-à-vis the apparent promise of “playability”
held out by Lanz’s setup here. The possibilities of controlling the scenario prove to be pathetic actually. But
it is indeed the lure of interactiveness that the artist is pointing up and questioning in this work as in a
number of earlier pieces where interactiveness was merely a sham.
By isolating and parodying certain codes and ways of behaving that are characteristic of the new information
technologies, Lanz manages to spark a profound reflection and comment on the new media with a
viewpoint that is shot through with irony and skepticism with respect to them.
IMAGE
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||