Background Radiation - Part II - The History of Myth
Site-Specific Video / Sound installation. Hackney Picture House. London, October 2015.
• Background Radiation - Concept
This series of works is about the idea of history - history as a simultaneous manifestation of events.
On a lake, three different stones hit three different points on the surface at three different moments. These stones create three individual waves, which gradually collide with each other and eventually reach the shore as a single wave. We, standing on the shore, can only recognise this singular wave, which embodies three distant events radiating from different spaces and times. Like the three stones and the singular wave, history is an accumulation of the collision of individual events that manifests itself to us as the singular event. Different events that take place at different times and places and that have nothing to do with each other, at some point begin to resonate with each other and create a unified event.
There we no longer recognise the individuality of the original. What we receive on the shore is the resonance of all these different events, as if they were all happening at the same time and in the same place. We experience history as an event taking place here and now, while we ourselves throw stones into the lake.
Representation begins with intuition. This is a work about the primary intuitions of the primordial, totemised in image and sound. The stimuli of life are mystified in a space in which the sacred and the profane, here and there, constantly slide into each other, flickering between myopic and hyperopic vision. A symbol is a sign of intuition that detects the arrival of the wave from the background radiation.
