One house, 4 different times of day
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The pigmentation of the city is a fine mixture of utterly fragmentated acoustic and visual signals, projections, disintegrations. It might present itself to a stranger as an inaccessible unit, a surface. Only if you look closer, every detail starts to interact with the watching individual. Eyes and ears experience a mass of signs . The urban experience is always subjective, dependent on time, place and on the perspective of the individual with his own personal history. Every event today is unique but becomes history in the future and part of the aura of a city. The real city becomes a symbolic space, a hallucination with its redundant narratives, with its broken rhythms and cacophonies.
Imagine the city as an interactive work of art constantly changed, manipulated, distorted, by the triggering impact of passers-by.
This is what will be formed in the installation concrete air.
What you see: techno-aesthetics of an urban phantasmagoria - houses
framed in five LCD screens, filmed in London over a period of two months (May/June 2002). The images morph from day to night, behind the windows there are minimalist movements.What you hear: a sound cast overlaid by a multiplicity of interactive tracks of noises of the city as well as voices. Short narratives which give us an insight in moments of urban living. Passers-by trigger and recombine the athmospheric noises and fragments of nine short-stories with the movement of their bodies while stepping on pressuremats which are scattered around the room.
Sound, image and narratives are run in equally important parallel streams.
The stories don't give a leading perspective, there is no narrator overlooking the events.
Like during a walk through a real city the visitor of concrete air keeps his own perspective and experiences a unique version of the events.
The city is never static, its text is endlessly re-composable. There is no final coherent story, there is no objectivity. There is just a set of voices around an axis of sound and vision, which you perceive as a construction by your senses.
Katarina Agathos
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