VIDEO OPTICA

The floating weightless air-sculpture also enchants us with its lightness, its playfulness, its romantic poetry brought on by the spherical bubble shape, and the way it evokes childhood memories. Its proximity to popular culture, the funfair, to modern shapes of the spectacular makes the Video Optica, as balloon, a symbol for the ephemeral and the volatile. Oscillating between aesthetic effect and meaningful content the Video Optica is a “blow-up“ representing many metaphors: the metaphor of fast paced accelerated growth, the metaphor of nature “in the age of mechanical reproduction“ (following Walter Benjamin) and the “loss of aura“ that is connected to it, which was supposed to revitalize art in the 90s. The giant balloon is a blow-up, it is art as simulacrum, imitating that which can be manipulated – and it is a “mass ornament“ (Siegfried Kracauer).

Kiki Seiler-Michalitsi, curator Kunstraum Riehen, Basel, 2006.