reflected in an unmarked space

reflected in an unmarked space is the most ambitious project so far of my attempts at "dissolution through sameness in emptiness", which together with the attempts at "procedural transformations of landscape" is the main area of my artistic activity. While any overlapping between the two investigative complexes is unintentional, it is not deliberately avoided. In the project reflected in an unmarked space, for instance, the theme of landscape in the broadest sense is already present in the title. An unmarked space,a spatial dimension, combined with reflected, a time value, time and space cancel each other out, as though one were falling into a hole, these mirror sittings are not self-reflection, but rather an immersion into a landscape that lies behind the mirror, one's image is not reproduced but rather swallowed, dissolved in an emptiness that first makes the setting into motion of the reality-copy-machine possible.

Looking into one's own eyes one gazes into the unknown. Once staring into emptiness has become almost programmatic, the trip behind the mirror landscape can begin.
With Carroll's Alice in one's backpack and Lacan in the the pocket of one's pants, one can dive in, into a landscape with neither land nor qualities. Enclosed in the mirror. Within the frame, immersed in a counter-landscape, in a garden decked out with a manifold of arbitrarily chosen actors from the arsenal of private acquaintances. A piece of reality, that could look like this but also otherwise.
The "Blue Box", the most strongly deterritorialised element in this respect, the metaphor for the application of coding mechanisms on a visual plane (a space devoid of place, shadow or identity), an anti-landscape, with neither land nor qualities, suggested itself for the realisation of this project, as already for "Decoding:Recoding", another project about "dissolution through sameness in emptiness".
Here, the "Blue Box" - method, in which by means of intense illumination something like the visualisation of coding systematics becomes possible, allowing the deliberate cultivation of the "Blue Box"garden with literally countless possibilities, is implicitly present without the expense of its actual employment.

100 performers invited to the mirror sitting, set into the garden of the mirror landscape. 100 persons from my personal environment, who draw a portrait of themselves by the way in which they gaze at the uncertainty behind the mirror landscape. The individual personality is challenged to an unusual degree by the reduction of the possibilities for action to mere looking. Every tiny gesture, a slight twitch of the eyelids, a fleeting inhalation from the corners of the mouth, a nervous wobbling of the flesh of the cheeks, arouses the attention of the observer, turns the participant into a portrait subject, raises the question about the meaning of the film, in which the performer/portrait subject seems to be inserted. A 16mm film, generally of the genre of educational films from the 1910's to the 1960's, is chosen by the participant on the basis of its theme, and thus constitutes the first self-description. The projection of the film at one's back, while one is robbed of the possibility of watching, insofar as one exercises the required self-discipline, follows directions, doesn't sneak a backward look from the corner of one's eye, throws one even more back upon oneself. Perhaps the request to abstain evokes in one's own eyes the arising of a picture puzzle to counteract the temptation of the world of images.

Finally the dissolution in emptiness leads, at least for the recipient, to a redoubling, since each film was chosen twice, whereby pairs with the same "landscape" ingredients were formed, which are again differentiated through the addition of an external quotation, which reflects the whole process again on the linguistic plane.