Katarina Matiasek + Scanner
Trabant Vienna Austria January March 1999
Hotel Utopia Independent Film Festival Vienna October 1999
Participating artists: Boris Becker, Louise Bougeois, Dan Graham, Madelon Hooykaas & Elsa Stansfield, Axel Hutte, Rika Noguchi, Bill Seaman, Gisela Stiegler & Beatrice Dreux
A single screen audio/visual installation with freeze frames taken out of different movies showing close-ups of people on the telephone. They're captured while blinking and show stages of closing one's eyes - the film sequences thus exhibit a specific brief moment of introspection otherwise invisible in the footage - a tiny breath.
Intersected by the image of a 'magic eye', stemming from radio days and suggesting a radar observation that scans the space, the twinkling wallpaper reflects the radio wave pirating of Scanner's composition. Just as the sampling of intendedly private conversation pins down the medium of music as an incubator of the private, the freeze frames caught from invisible short moments in found footage reveal cinematographic imagery as a monumentalizer of the intimate.
The sound uses recordings of the 'spaces in-between' during telephone conversations; moments frozen in time on tape of the pauses, commas and interludes in this familiar form of interaction. In such moments everything is spoken and yet nothing, the silences often speaking louder than the conversations themselves. One learns to 'close' these spaces and enter into the invisible narrative - hence CLOSURE, the same way one repairs sentences between friends and family, replacing the 'ummms' and 'errs' with the relevant yet unspoken details.
As both sound and image use hidden material that nevertheless is accessible in public space to every observor, the installation imports a certain virulent atmosphere. It stains the retina with the lost temporal moments of the image, the ear with the lost empty spaces of interpersonal communication.
