STATE OF FLUX
Künstler/in
Rainer Gamsjäger
(geb. 1974 in Bad Ischl, Oberösterreich)
Date2009
ClassificationsVideo
MediumVideoserie (Wave#1, Wave#2, Wave#3) auf DVD-R, 16:9, HD, color, sound
DimensionsVideo 1: 3 min 35 sec 760 ms; Video 2: 3 min 37 sec 120 ms; Video 3: 3 min 48 sec 360 ms
Credit LineArtothek des Bundes
Object number27414
DescriptionThe videoseries “State Of Flux” can be understood as a nature study in the broadest sense. Initial point was the interest in chaotic systems and their behaviour, here especially water and waterstreams in a therefor created “digital parallelspace”. The water keeps on flowing, but it flows somehow different. The raw footage was exclusevly shooted at barrages, places where the brute power of water is utilized. Energy is transformed from one form into another. In “State Of Flux” a new field is emerging, that moves energy through space and time.“Art is not a reflection of reality, it’s the reality of this reflection,” wrote Jean-Luc Godard in 1967. Some 30 years later Jacques Rancière characterized the arts’ “aesthetic regime” as referring to art objects’ manner of being, having destroyed the general conditions in which similarity and mimesis operate, and replacing the rational chain of object and image with direct presence. The nature studies in State of Flux, as Rainer Gamsjaeger himself calls them, establish themselves at this interface where the link between reality and objects of art disintegrates. Digitally generated visual layers seem to have been inserted into footage of swirling water at barrages, an artificial reflection superimposed over water’s “natural” chaotic system.
State of Flux resembles a hybrid visual stream that removes the distinction between reality and image. Similarly to Gamsjaeger’s Trifter series, State of Flux never clearly reveals the ratio of reality and digitally generated elements in the work, and the images’ “manner of being” remains uncertain: appropriation, simulation, alienation, superimposition, reconstruction? In an age in which the relationship between images and concrete objects has become questionable on the whole, and this situation creates “glasting uncertainty” concerning their status (Hito Steyerl), Rainer Gamsjaeger emphatically asserts a specifically aesthetic regime of the visual as the reality of a reflection on the relationships between things, symbols, time and movement which itself creates this visual. The question is perhaps not so much whether simulation or alteration of reality is involved, or the amount of nature, but the extent to which State of Flux refers to nothing less than one’s own performance of this reality of reflection.
Reinhard Braun
http://rainergamsjaeger.com/?page_id=14
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Arnulf Rainer
