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‘Outlook’ is a site-specific installation proposal for the MMKK (Museum of Modern Art Carinthia) that critically engages with both Carinthian history as well as with contemporary media of image-based artistic practices. Originating from Josef Ferdinand Fromiller’s altar fresco (an illusionist depiction of the view from the apse of a chapel overlooking Millstatt), our project creates reciprocities between the physical and the virtual.
Through theartistic method of reconstruction, we initiate a reinterpretation of the cultural contexts manifested in the illusionistic frescoes of the castle chapel. In our take the apse from the fresco becomes a three-dimensional platform, physically accessible as a spatialized object. It is being geographically oriented towards Millstatt, while the video animation projected onto the wall thematically addresses the Millstatt region, thus continuing the dialogue between Fromiller’s pained landscapes and our artistic intervention.
Opposite to the fresco a historic balcony inserts itself as a bay-window into the room. From this particular level and from that spot only does the perspectival illusion of the fresco come into completion. While standing at the reconstructed apse, visitors of the installation, when they turn around, will encounter themselves as a ‘reflection’ on the screen positioned on the chapel’s balcony. This mirror-image is a result of a real-time video capture and a streamed signal, transmitted from the web-cam below to the monitor above. Therefore a hierarchy of the one singular gaze onto the fresco from the balcony is negated; instead, the ‘Outlook’ constructs its own illusion-machinery of perspectives, defined by the interplay of the eye, the camera, and the projection/screen.
Our project explores the impact of physical and virtual spaces onto the onlooker, conceptually drawing from the historical fresco and by disclosing the constructability of the artwork. Through an artistic multimedia intervention we aim to quite literally place a critical speculation about the effects of tracing perspectives beyond the picture-plane of the image into the very space itself. Thereby the entire castle chapel becomes a trans-media camera obscura, testing viewing trajectories onto the image as well as those coming out from within it. With our ‘Outlook’ we want to heighten an awareness for the space-generative potential of looking and to challenge the viewer’s role in observing an artwork against the coordinate system of current media conditions.
Credits_
The project has been conceived by members of dband – collective for spatial narratives and audiovisual choreography:
Jakob Jakubowski, Steve Nest, Wolfgang Novotny
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