Where does space take place? TV has made its business to show the outside world as it is. The audience watches live events modified by slow motion and movements that were split into single images. This helps to make reality appear more real. Video uses secondary communication processes. A phantom pilot checks is surroundings on a video monitor. He is not supposed to see. His world is immaterial, it consists of information held together by electric energy. Video art gives a new definition for the relation to the audience because it does not necessarily reflect the exact image of reality. You don´t read pictures like you would read language, so linear comprehension of knowledge becomes meaningless. Video images create unfamiliar relationships. They collage, alienate, distort, carve a notch in the omnipresent documentary-news-family-drama of TV.

The video installation V.(alery) was realized by assembling material objects from Robert Altman´s movie “The Player” with a collage of video images. It was presented in 1992 at the University of Arts in Berlin and was part of the exhibition called Paravisionen.

Circuit boards, taken from the interior of electronic devices, were transformed to small objects of art, sculptures and pictures. Together with a film loop of 140 seconds, a movie about a movie, they put in concrete form the strained relation between material and narrative reality of media-oriented worlds.

Text that appeared at the entrance of the installation space.

“On a Wednesday, a day when cinemas are cheaper in Berlin, von masal took May´s video camera to photograph the movie The Player. Then we watched the video together and von masal selected the part of the tape that was needed to build an object with. Meanwhile V.(alery) took a TV set, disassembled it and began playing with its electronic interior. She built an object from it. We asked her if it was absurd to play with this electro stuff. I mean, without any relation to its original purpose? V.(alery) simply answered that it was a black and white TV. No technology would be interested in this material. She continued to play, and commented that she didn´t care for the original technical purpose. By the way, she´d colored objects and she wanted to touch them. One guy, I don´t exactly remember who he was, remarked that it would be interesting to know why this electro stuff couldn´t be made use of any longer. Somebody else answered that it was a question of money. von masal obviously didn´t listen to the conversation. She said that she would identify herself with the female secretary in the movie. She thought that a film ought to be the same as life. Julia Roberts should have died on the electric chair. We reminded her, that this was also just a part of the film. We decided to stay together in the apartment for two weeks. During this period we continued building objects. von masal”