Karin Lustenberger
Here and Now

In Basel-based artist Karin Lustenberger’s interactive installation Here and Now (2013/2016), two wireless cameras scan the exhibition space in front of a wall-sized projection screen. Their images can be seen on the projection in real time. These small cameras, commonly used for electronic surveillance, are each held by an artificial human hand whose robotic movements follows programmed control impulses. However, the cameras are repeatedly disturbed in their recording function by specific radio signals, which lead to interference with the projection. The reciprocity between real space and image interference develops into flickering swarms of pixels that repeatedly create their own dynamics and merge into digitally abstract representations before familiar fragments reappear again on the large screen.

Since the emergence of Cubism, two basic approaches in visual representation can be said to open out new perspectives. Roughly simplified, the representation is either broken up, fragmented or interrupted; or it is reassembled from several components. Lustenberger succeeds, in her ingeniously composed installation, by dissembling surveillance cameras’ pure record-keeping function to skilfully allow the inherent quality of visual digital worlds to emerge.

(Text: Bettina Back)