ROMINA SHAMA

POINTLESS VANISHING POINT

In situ video installation and land art piece for le Musée de L'Elysée, Lausanne.

    

A motion sensor camera placed at the entry of the cave films the space in real-time. A projector transmits this image with a few seconds of time delay to a screen placed at the far end of the room. The idea is to create an infinite regress of the time continuum where the past and the future overlap in a multi-dimensional present. An impression of reversing time, and thus, space. The video footage is projected with a time-shift so as to provoke a loss of reference, a certain disorientation, in the spectator who is seeing and following an infinite number of versions of himself.

    

The system, as it is set up, captures ephemeral portraits that question the architecture of time through movement and repetition. For this installation, the essence of the work is the place in presence of the event (here, the spectator) without whom nothing will happen. If nobody enters the cave, there is no movement, the system isn’t activated and time remains suspended. Nothing happens. It is the Event that creates Time, and by analogy, the existence of physical matter and its image (however fleeting) in perpetual motion.

    

The first video is one hour of the actual projection with no sound. The second video is an iphone video someone made whilst inside the installation.