johannes amorosa

INSTALLATION: "Untitled" (2006)
(working title: "Wilna")

At the core of the video installation “Wilna” is footage filmed from the top of one of the hills of Lithuania’s capital city Vilnius. It captures the urban landscape near the banks of the Vilnia (Wilna in german), the river that originally gave the city its name. Traffic flows steadily and public buses approach, taking the inhabitants home or elsewhere.

This video footage was heavily processed in a 3D environment: the material was first virtually projected and “flattened out” on a 2-dimensional plane, then the river was roughly outlined and completely deleted from the film footage. Ongoing 3D-processes are rendered to the video. Its integration into the multiple-element installation as a whole is fundamental to the work of art.

In an additional process, the outline of the “omitted” river in the film was extracted from its virtual video context and built into a tangible, 3-dimensional wooden frame. The wooden construction is enveloped in a broad band of polypropylene foam, thus clearly corresponding and correlating with the “river-object” in the video.

The sculpture is laid out across the room on a plastic sheet in the identical 16:10 ratio of the screen, thereby mirroring the video landscape as a large-scale reconstruction. The brightness emitted from the flickering screen draws an immediate parallel to its wood and polypropylene counterpart beyond the artificial environment. The virtual and the actual exist in space in a relationship of mutual translation and perpetual echoing.