2META at mkl

2META at MedienKunstLabor

Does the video art shows the view of a technical eye, which makes a world of fantasies visible? Or is it the present expression for the diffuse awareness of life in a multimedia society today?

When electronic media at the end of the 60’s came more closely with the popular culture, a break-through of the video art began. Since then, a huge number of electronically and/or digitally processed pictures flow through the world and were put together into narrative sequences. They often result from commercial video clips, comics, television scenes and parts from other technical sources for images. In the video installation „I've seen someone that wasn't there“ the artist duo Romelo Pervolovici and Maria Manulescu takes the theory of visual perception and the seeing, as well as the relation between artwork and viewer as a cause for serial production of motive of the “artificial eyes“. The duo „2meta “assigns „disembodied eye“ or „the pure view“ to the category of technical instruments. Therefore the infrared movement cameras pursue the viewer and steer the technically multiplied pairs of eyes, which are to be seen on screens. Observer and the observed are changing roles, are mirrored and steered in the eyes twinkling, mutually.

What appears is the moving view, being present and absent in a same time. The present is determined by the irregularity of the movement and fluctuation of visitors coming into an installation space. The viewer and/or observer become the playing and the play object. The game, irony and social and media criticism are here refined and brought together on the meta level of a visual discourse.

„I like to believe that the artist belongs to the category of those who research; meaning he is one of the seekers, the explorers”. (Romelo Pervolovici)

In its artistic expression and in its artistic work, the duo „2meta“shows quite a strong experimental orientation and interest for the new methods, new media and new tools. This interest was strongly pointed up in the laboratory-like situations in the developing process of the work „I've seen someone that wasn't there“. In the interaction between the spatial and technical possibilities of the MedienKunstLabor on the one hand, as well as between the ideas and concepts of the artists “with” and “against” the will of theirs technician (the programmer Andrei Gheorghe) on the other hand, the basic idea of the gallery space, as a “lab space” has also been expressed.

MedienKunstLabor im Kunsthaus Graz is trying to open space of possibilities for a dialogue between art, science and new technologies, whose results are actually not foreseeable. In this sense, the video installation of “2meta” is an attempt, in order to set an artistic experiment, but also in addition, the intention to stimulate „the experiment: art“itself.(Mirjana Peitler)