Time Fades Video Installation at BERLIN KULTURFORUM 2008

Time Fades Video Installation at BERLIN KULTURFORUM 2008 (Short/ HD) from Philipp Geist | Videogeist on Vimeo.
Documentary by Patrick Heeren
‚Time Fades’
Installation by Philipp Geist
During the 'Long Night of the Museums', which is a special event taking place twice a year when most of Berlin´s museums are open till 2 a.m., the Berlin-based artist Philipp Geist showed his video installation 'time fades' at the Kulturforum. In his installation Geist interprets the themes of space and time. He avoids using canvasses and projects directly on parts of the façade of the architecture and on transparent grounds like sheets of gauze and fog. The result is an interplay between the concrete, tangible wall and the transparent, dissolving ground of projection. This concept refers to the characteristics of history as experienced in a museum: history and the notion of it mainly develop subjectively in the mind of the onlooker. The representations of history are being animated in the moment of the visitor´s reflections. The dissolving projection ground symbolizes not only the fragmentary knowledge and understanding of the life in the past, which is to be completed, but also the memory which must be saved from disappearing and dissolving. Thus, Geist develops a dialogue with the location, his artistic work and the people who are entering and leaving the building. The visitor himself becomes part of the projected image at the threshold between the outside and inside.
Starting point of his video work were the collections of the museums, which Philipp Geis had filmed and photographed. The ancient art objects, as for example statues, sculptures, busts, paintings, gold decoration and mosaics in Rome and Berlin, were transformed with modern digital techniques (hard- and software) to manipulate the filmed images by abstracting, recolouring and overlaying them. Elements of the art pieces were separated from their context and arranged in new picture variants and artistic compositions. In the video installation, art pieces of the same and different epochs were combined. This conceptualisation emphasizes the simultaneous xistence of successive times and events in the visitor´s mind and the coexistence of different epochs in the historical knowledege of our time. The collections of the museums in Berlin are experienced from a contemporary perspective and interpreted in an artistic way.