Ping Pong Dance, 2006

Description:

What you see are two blue buckets on the floor, with ping pong balls flying in and out of them. They seem to be playing a game, much like children used to play in the old days.

Ping Pong Dance was one of my first installations combining physical objects with video projections in a way that would become characteristic of many works that followed.

I think the idea came simply from seeing these blue buckets outside a small household goods shop in Berlin. I passed the shop almost every day on my way from my studio at Künstlerhaus Bethanien on Mariannenplatz to Oranienstrasse, where I would go for coffee. An older Turkish couple ran the shop, displaying all kinds of everyday objects for sale. I kept looking at these things as potential material for making art.

I had just bought my first video projector, which meant I could bring objects into my studio, place them against the wall, and experiment with projecting images onto them. The idea of ping pong balls flying in and out of the buckets came from the simple fact that the buckets had openings through which things could enter and disappear. And to give the balls something to do, I made them bounce into each other.

An important discovery was that by giving the animated balls shadows, I could create the illusion that they were actually floating in the air, about 30 centimetres in front of the wall. I also realised that by projecting a black frame around the buckets, I could make the balls appear to fly beyond the boundaries of the projected image.

These simple tricks opened up an entirely new world of possibilities for me. The work became an exploration of imagination and the relationship between the mental and the physical, between what is actually there and what we perceive to be there. The relationship between our surroundings, our imagination, and our mental well-being has always been central to my interests.

Since the mid nineties I had been interested in the virtual dimension of the computer and the physical world and this was also a continuation of my experiments with that.

Title: Ping Pong Dance

Year: 2006

Materials: Plastic Buckets. Computer Animation. Sound. Video Projector. Speakers

Dimensions: ca 2 × 3 × 5 meters

Duration:

Exhibition history:

Safn - Museum for Contemporary Art in Reykjavik

Collections:

Three editions are in 3 private collections

Categories:

Video Installation

Animation

Music & Sound