WALD, 2006
3–channel video installation, 7 min 33 sec

in collaboration with Manuela Hartl and Eva Hartmann

This three channel installation is about observation and pursuit, the hunter and the quarry. The viewer is witness to three people stalking in the woods presented on three screens. The figures gradually close in on one another and then back off in a closed-circuit of filming and being filmed, each a perpetrator and a victim.

Evolving from a diffuse motionless setting in the grass, the images begin to pass randomly amongst the trees, till a glimpse of distant movement suddenly focusses attention. Passive awareness of the surroundings has become active curiosity. Stealthily watching and following one another, the protagonists eventually meet in a clearing, scrutinising each other in animal fashion before backing off and finally disappearing amongst the trees without further incident.

For the viewer, the simultaneous spying and being spied upon negates any sense of heirarchical supervision. The players are equals in the monitoring process. The viewer has the advantage of perceiving this closed-circuit observation, whilst the participants could only suspect it, since each stalker is in turn being trailed by a third person outside their field of vision. In that the process being observed is the process of observing another, one‘s own superiorty is destabalised by the suspicion that one indeed might be under observation oneself, a speculation which remains unresolved.

‚Wald‘ leaves the viewer to find a climax. Apparently the mutual interest in one another peters out, the situation concluding not in a denoument, but rather in a return to the initial indifference. Any expectations by the viewer that something should happen remain unfulfilled.