Public Address 2012
HD video (1280x720p)
Pal, colour, sound
Duration: 19.10”
HD video (1280x720p)
Pal, colour, sound
Duration: 19.10”
Public Address presents a shortened version of an hour-long continuous recording of the stream of visitors to the most iconic building of the post-communist era, the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany. Over time it becomes apparent that many of the visitors passing in front of the camera feel compelled to look directly into the lens thus their behaviour exhibits a strange phenomenon that evokes a return of the gaze by the viewer. Mitchell suggests that “visual reciprocity is not merely a by-product of social reality but actively constitutive of it.” 1
In the attendant sound track four public speeches given in Berlin at different times by Presidents Obama, Reagan and Kennedy, including a second speech by Reagan at Bergen Belson in 1985, combine to create overlapping, fractured and intersecting timelines. Recurrent ‘Cold War’ themes are reiterated in all but one of the speeches yet they also resonate a shift in political and economical perspectives before and after the fall of the wall. |
Public Address explores the contemporary sense of a post-historical era engendered by the folding of the historic remnant into the present. In the case of the Reichstag the modern addition of the glass dome constitutes an interstitial space that situates the visitor, and viewer alike, in an experience of viewing the past through the present.
1 What Do Pictures "Really" Want? W. J. T. Mitchell, October, Vol. 77. (Summer, 1996), pp. 71-82. |