Martina Stella: How Many Different Things Can A Screen Be?

The Water Light Festival’s fifth edition takes place in Brixen and its surroundings, from May 3 to 21, 2023. Curated by Nika Perne and Werner Zanotti, the festival gathers forty-eight light-based installations: interactive devices and video mapping projections, light sculptures, sound-reacting lasers, data visualizations, kinetic architectures, and live performers (for the first time!). It brings together local, regional, and international artists, whose work is related to water and light themes.

The festival is spread over three sites: in Brixen city center, twenty installations enlighten the public space, in the Franzensfeste fortress, seven artworks inhabit the impressive nineteenth-century building, and in the Neustift Augustinian Canons’ Monastery, the Water Light Festival Lab takes place. The fact of bringing together indoor and outdoor exhibitions is an asset of the Water Light Festival, which stands out for its selection of qualitative and committed artworks.

Focus on the Water Light Lab in Water Light Festival Brixen

As its name suggests, the exhibition is conceived as a laboratory, a shared space for artistic experimentation. Curated by Bettina Pelz, the Water Light Lab represents twenty-two international artists. It brings together the work of ten professional artists, whose practices are already established in different circuits, such as festivals, galleries, or museums, and twelve students and alumni/ae from the University of the Arts in Bremen (Germany). The common thread of the exhibition is light as a medium: the interaction with other devices, materialities, environments, and bodies, contributes to wider meanings of “light” in digital arts.

An exhibition within the exhibition

The Water Light Lab takes place within the Neustift Abbey Museum’s permanent exhibition. The Neustift Abbey is the largest monastery complex in Tyrol, dating to the 12th Century. To date, the Augustinian Convent is a spiritual, social, and cultural center with places for living and worshiping, an extensive monastery library, a teaching collection, and monastery school, a historic garden with centuries-old trees, baroque fountains, and an extensive collection of healing herbs, and a well-known winery. Displaying contemporary artworks amongst ancient art pieces, the Water Light Lab exhibition initiates the encounter of different spatial, temporal, and technological realities.

One of the specificities of an in situ artwork is creating connections between an installation and its surroundings. The expression in situ is often used to describe a piece that has been conceived to be exhibited in a particular place, as a permanent or semi-permanent installation. Thus, the curator can be a determinant intermediary in creating in-situ environments for already existing artworks, unveiling a dialogue between an art piece and a specific site.

Dialogues between textures

Diving into the darkness of the museum’s library, we find ourselves roofed by projections. “Tentakulum” is an architectural projection by the German collective Groll, Berndt, and Seltmann. Two soft-edged beamers are placed vertically on the ground: the ceiling’s decorative structures are covered with natural elements such as ants, leaves, and tentacles-shaped textures. The ceiling is revealed through the projection: the architecture isn’t just a surface, it becomes part of the image.

A dialogue can also take place between two artworks. Angelika Hoeger’s installation “Flow” unfolds from the museum’s principal entrance through to its stairs. This sculpture is composed of transparent plastic straws, assembled as water molecules. “Flow” plays with clarity and natural light: the straw’s reticle looks like a real-scale drawing made of white lines and shadows. This installation counteracts Christine Sciulli’s work “Geborgenheit”, which we meet on the path. In a dark room, white lines are projected on a tulle material sculpture going from the ceiling to the floor. What we perceive as strokes are circles that, encountering the tulle three-dimensional shape, become irregular moving signs. The two installations create an interesting contraposition in their use of light, lines, and polymer-based materials.

Mirroring

We discover Nazanin Fakoor’s poetic installation “Rainbow”, on the museum’s ground floor. A mobile with several sheets of mirror paper rotates incessantly, seizing the projection of colorful video sequences. Nazanin’s research on reflections brings images to aleatory alteration: hitting the mirrors, the pictures are echoed in the room as abstract colorful rainbows. When the projection misses the mirror sheet, we can recognize the artist’s portrait appearing on the wall.

The Chinese cabinet hosts Ken Matsubara “Moon Bowls”. We are surrounded by softened natural light and frescos’ smooth pastel palette. Several Chinese bowls lay on the ground: we need to crouch to observe them. Inside, a rounded mirror displays moving images: our reflection interferes with the phantasmagoric silhouettes of animated objects in a loop. A mirror shows a glass falling and crushing, and another one a bird hitting the water’s surface … in Ken Matsubara’s work, images break but objects don’t. Looking inside these hypnotic bowls, we ask ourselves: how deep can a screen be?

In and out of the screen

“Luminous Objects” is a project from Lorenz Potthast. The museum’s stairs are punctuated by three framed screens, augmented by 3D geometrical structures fixed on their surfaces. These objects, such as a transparent semi-sphere, transform the video content into prisms of light and disruptive elements. As if an invisible light source was moving in the room, the screens react to the physicality of 3D additions, displaying their shadows. The installation recalls paintings’ connotative features: hanging on a wall at a certain height from the floor. Thus, the light comes from within, it comes from the screen. No museum lighting is needed because the artworks themselves provide it. The incidence of objects’ actual dimension on the screen’s virtual dimension is almost disturbing: how many different things can a screen be?

The screen is something to escape from, would answer Gudrun Barenbrock in her video installation “Floating Matter”. The video represents several aquatic environments, mixing footage, photographs, and sounds from the artist’s archives. The video slowly pivots on full screen, making an empty black background appear. This rotating movement dissociates the perimeter of the video from the frame of the screen as if images wanted to go beyond this limiting support.

Light and other immaterials

We acknowledge more and more the variety of materials that light can relate to: mirrors, tulle, plastic, paper, and ceramics. But also glass, as in Nathalie Gebert, “Refraction; Dislocation”. The installation is hypnotic and reverberates in its surroundings: while listening to the sound of the falling spheres, movements within a rounded frame, slowly rotating, we recognize the installation’s shadow generated by two led blue-white spots on a missing panel in a gothic triptych. How about more immaterial devices? Language for instance, or technological apparatuses, such as data and artificial intelligence.

While Sangbong Lee, “Cartesian Pineal Gland” installation is based on data visualization from written text to a laser light play, Youngji Cho’s projection “Circles”, and Debaditya Bhowmik’s work, “The Syncretic Paradox”, question whether AI could be considered an artistic medium itself.

“The Syncretic Paradox” is composed of a screen, equipped with a keyboard, and enlightened by a candle. On the keyboard, the letters are replaced by unreadable signs. This interactive installation invites the spectator to press on the key, the screen will then display the person’s assigned god or goddess. Debaditya uses AI to generate new gods’ images and profiles, while an algorithm plays the role of the cartomancy fortune teller. The link between the keyboard’s key and the god that the algorithm assigns us is thus completely arbitrary: our actions and choices are illusions created by this apparatus.

Between interactive and participative works

Kui Xu’s “Fullfill” is an interactive installation. Images are generated from light and sound elements: a camera is recording the luminous intensity surrounding a microphone, ready to translate it into points of light. The loudest we sing, the fastest the painting is created. In Kui’s installation, there is no sound without presence, with no image without sound. The spectator is responsible for the process of this participative artwork.

Bon Kim’s installation “A Chair for Co-responding”, invites us to sit in front of a trunk. Depending on how much energy (or heat) our body transmits to the chair’s sensors, a little led light on the truck switches on and illuminates the wood’s details. The artwork is activated by our presence, we highlight it with our body’s charge.

Can we define as “participative” those artworks which need the spectators’ presence or their participation to be activated? If in Philipp Artus’s interactive installation “Flora”, the spectator’s choices determine the shape and rhythm of a digital drawing, the approach of Slava Romanov’s installation “In the Style of”, is based on the opposite paradigm. The artwork’s legibility depends on our position in the room: the more we get closer to the support, the more the image gets blurred.

Drawings and text-based installations

In the museum’s musical instrument collection, amongst various guitars and other familiar-shaped instruments, we discover Mria Prosphora artwork’s “Cинтон”. Here, the machine generating sound has no strings, but hand drawings. On rotating support, a transparent sheet is traversed by laser light. It reacts to the geometrical drawings’ binary system of transparency and opacity. Light reads the lines as zeros and ones, empty and filled, generating sounds according to the handwritten surface behavior.

We find Benjamin Bergmann’s “Muhammad Ali” in the Engelsburg tower, a hexagon-shaped building in front of the museum’s main building. It is a light sculpture of the words “ME WE”. Inspired by the famous boxer’s quote, this statement is made of light bulbs reverberating on the surrounding stones. Right next to it, Sam Durant handwritten text on large-sized light boxes states that “No lie can live forever”, and that “We Are the People”. Putting words on things, they make explicit the collective dimension of the exhibition and Bettina Pelz’s curatorial thinking.

Light as

Bringing together artists from different generations and cultures, the Water Light Lab makes us reflect on our ways of seeing, thinking, and acting through time. The steps of awareness and sensitization on subjects such as ecology and energy waste are numerous. From this point of view, the Water Light Lab and the entire Water Light Festival are inspiring and engaging exhibitions. The Brixen festival demonstrates strong ecological values and commitment: it fosters green energy, minimizes printed materials, saves public light, and is sustainable in artists’ travels and logistics.

But also, it organizes the Water Light Hub, a panel of conferences that creates the opportunity for discussion and exchanges. The festival’s motto “Water is Life, Light is Art” proposes a viewpoint on these two natural elements, pointing at their connections with creation and existence. The double dimension of engagement from both sociocultural and artistic points of view succeeds in rising awareness and proposing insights, inviting the public to reflect upon artworks with very strong and intelligible ecological meanings.

Published on 30 May 2023.
MARTINA STELLA
Martina Stella is an artist, theorist, and writer on transmedia practices in digital arts. She is based in Paris and Trieste.

FEATURED IMAGE
Francois Morellet. WATER LIGHT FESTIVAL Neustift Abbey 2023. Photo: Jennifer Braun.