Week 2 - Artist profile: Pipilotti Rist
- annabensky
- Feb 27, 2022
- 5 min read
Notes:
"I consider dreams or closed eyes reality the same importance as perceiving the world with open eyes... even if we open the eye, what we really in the end process is only a tiny extract and extremely subjective. And from that knowledge, I give the same importance to looking inward and outward. And inward we are even more isolated, and I'm so interested to see what the others see when they close their eyes and my only way to come close is to make propositions."
I think this is still the key idea that I want to focus on, although I'm finding it hard to find the exact word for it - perhaps "ecologies" is close?
I want to keep exploring that idea of fragmented realities, of how we remember fragments of things that build the whole of an experience for us, how our minds work with our inner selves and outer "data input" via the body to create an understanding of our experiences.
"Today we put all our knowledge, our feelings, our history, behind flat screens with a normed form. My big goal is to free these images, to free that wonderlight, by treating it like painting behind glass, but also to free it in the room, to put it back to our bodies... that's one of my goals... I don't make any separation between our body and nature... we are organic structure, chaotic,... you are not a Porche, you're really a plant with no roots, a plant that can walk... The body is all we have, and it's a camera, it's a recording system, all the technical tools I use to do my works are already incorporated in our given structure."
"...a time when I was focusing on mistakes produced by machines, machines that can handle information, if they have too much or too little looks really similar to how our body reacts to over or underestimation... If there is too much wanted of us we react with psychosomatic illnesses, and the machines, I am convinced, have these illnesses in themselves because the machines were made by humans too, their characters are there, their senses are there, and when the machines produce these pictures they come close to our inner pictures."
-"I'm interested to have works that melancholy and utopia is combined and not trying to take melancholy out or the pain, suffering, should hang in the images also and reconcile us with the opposite tendency of joy and pain, so melancholy is a philosophical question, how we survive by knowing that we will not survive. The knowledge of all the contradictions of our ephemerality, of the fact that people hurt each other..."
"I want the visitor [to Pixel Forest] to be immersed or fully in with the other visitors, to be together in a thinking bubble, and sound is the ultimate symbol of that triggering that we are one. And it's not speaking to your intellectual dimensions but to your emotional dimensions, to your archaic animal dimensions, and that is the quality of sound... Pixel Forest is like an exploded screen, you would take every pixel and take them in a chaotic way into the room. It looks not geometric but actually every pixel is addressed...so when I play the video in it it has a whole movement through the room. It's one three-dimensional image. The experience the audience has...resembles our brain. Our brain is working with electromagnetic waves and little electric...low voltage information, and the skull is dark and inside there is [energy]... people get calm...they say they have come to a place they know but have never seen"
"In my shows, I like to welcome the visitor with the whole body. It means I give possibilities, that is not limited to a standing horizontal view... opening the perspectives in every direction... A show by me is like a journey through a body, or a helter-skelter through vessels, and you not only encounter works but you encounter the other watching the works... My goal is that the visitor identifies with the works, that the person entering the room thinks "oh I have done that myself"...it's not important who has done it. That's our job as the artist: to bring propositions, how emotion and inner pictures could be, and I'm very much interested in all the images that come up when you close the eyes."
Below are two recent works of Rist's that interest me currently. It is curious to me how many more artists over the past two years especially have expanded their use of digital media - Apollomat Wall is quite different to previous works of Rist's I'm familiar with. The "melting of knowledge and feelings" aspect is intriguing to me having looked into cognition, the collapse of mind-body-self-environment boundaries, and ecologies of knowledge last year. Similarly Sleeping Pollen interests me because of Rist's installation strategy and her use of multiple audiovisual components in creating a reimagined idea of nature. Rist's goal - "to take this cold, technical media and make it warm, to reject the divide between organic and mechanical" - do resonate really strongly with me; this is something I want to focus on more this year. I don't simply want to document or pick things apart for the sake of colation or recording, I want to figure out how I can do so in a way that offers a meaningful view...
Notes from @Pipilotti Rist, Pioneer of Video Art | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 55
- Known for her video works, immersive installations, and vibrant use of colour
- decided to use her work to explore the vibrancy and complexity of the world, rather than heavy subjects; or if exploring heavy subjects, to do it in a way that is vibrant and optimistic, that offers different viewpoints and perspectives
- uses vivid colours; "colours as suspicious because they are sucking you in, they are emotional,...whereas black and white is a line...I have to stand up for the colours", they are a symbol of life and energy
- nudity as "no time, no social class", stipped of worldly markers of status and symbols; feminist and social commentary often features in her work
- everything starts with the camera; an extension of the body - allowing us to experience different perspectives than our body would ordinarily allow us; explores the relationship of technology and the natural world - natural and digital united in communication with the viewer
- Projectors as a means to break out of the square of the screen; and environment that welcomes people - "leave worries at the door", a feeling of "coming home"
- Video work exploring the Rhine - discovered a world of colour, dirt, bubbles, processes, etc. unseen to the human eye; a physical experience and new world captured on film
- Pixel Forest - explores overload of information by breaking it down into its pieces; an audiovisual installation that immerses the visitor in the work
- addresses multiple senses
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