Nicolas Wiese & Yoav Pasovsky »Mill« Audiovisual Installation
2-channel video and 4-channel sound, cloth screens, angular walls
Festival ArtMuse, LWL Landesmuseum Bocholt, July 2011

Concept / video: Nicolas Wiese
Audio composition: Yoav Pasovsky and Nicolas Wiese

This work aims at vague collective associations derived from historical images of people working – images which are mostly drawn out of context to serve a specific reading.

How does today’s viewer perceive these images, considering one’s experience of mass media consumption, and one’s temporal distance? How do we as observers, if we do it all, observe ourselves and our associative thoughts? What happens to the reading of images under certain methods of processing and juxtaposition?

The aesthetics of this installation bears reference to classic animation film, and combines a ‚hauntingly nostalgic‘ impression with a contemporary digital one. The screen setting avoids rectangular frontal views, and therefore dismisses the normal viewing situation of film and TV. There is no attempt to simulate spatial depth within the frame of a two-dimensional screen panel.
The historical imagery is used non-metaphorically – it stands for nothing but for itself. These images are encompassed by extensions through collage, manual drawings and textural interweaving. Whether this means pushing the historical images aside or spotlighting them in a new associative context depends on the viewer’s perspective.

The audio part of the installation, conceived in collaboration with Yoav Pasovsky, connects dry sounds of mechanics and machines with atmospheric and ambiguous musical patterns. The mutual amplification of the auditive and the visual part, decidedly shifting between synchronicity and non-synchronicity, results in an ever-rearranging multilayered audiovisual complex.