VIDEOTELLURIUM | 2008 - 09
Video sculpture
Variable size: 5m - 20m
supported by
-Fachausschuss Audiovision und Multimedia der Kantone Basel-Stadt und Basel-Landschaft
-Ernst Göhner Stiftung
-ValiART bei Valiant
Videotellurium / Motion II
„The Earth reminded
us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space.
As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally
it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you
can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile,
so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble
and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.“
– Astronaut James Irwin, USA
The Video-Tellurium moves the viewer away from earth into the
darkness of outer space and shows our planet from an exterior perspective.
The Videotellurium fixes questions in the planets and seeks to preserve these
factors as artifacts for the future.
Katja Loher’s Videotellurium is a grand, full-scale sculptural representation
of a tellurium – a mechanical model of the planets and moons in our solar
system. Katja’s sculpture uses weather balloons as the planets. Orbiting
video projectors suggest satellites or moons and project video images onto the
planets. The Videoplanets circle the ‘sun’ at the center point of
the room at different speeds and in different direction.
The projected video, shown on the weather balloons, consists of a bird’s-eye
view of seemingly anonymous crowds of people that begin to perform intricately
structured choreographies. As if under a microscope we can study them for meaning,
and as we begin to perceive meaning in their movements we begin to see that they
have formed letters. During these moments we recognize a higher intelligence,
and when they form sentences we engage these creatures and begin to almost participate
with them in a dialogue.
In the choreography that Katja creates, the mass of people continually transform
themselves and create abstract patterns that become like ornaments in a kaleidoscope.
The choreography evolves to letters, a part of an apparent attempt to communicate.
As an example the questions that are projected onto the red planet’s surfaces: “Do
fish love cats as much as cats love fish ? How can a fish tell a cat when a fish
loves a cat ? How can we dance with both feet on the ground ?”
These questions are combined with scenes, where the people become numbered
parts of this enormous machine of synchronized movement.