Skinn & Lak, 2001

Description:

The video documents a performance I made at the Poliphony Festival, held at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík in 2001.

What you see is a large piece of cloth, or a bedsheet, with my head sticking through a hole cut in the middle, while various animations are projected onto the fabric. The body is a hand-drawn animation of a human figure that transforms into a spider, then into a falling meteor, a pattern of thoughts, and various other shapes.

I think I was still exploring ideas around virtual reality and how the digital dimension was quietly finding its way into our lives, almost without anyone noticing. My face is real, but the body attached to it is virtual and could become almost anything.

In Icelandic, skinn means skin and lak means bedsheet, so the title Skinn & Lak could be translated into English as Skin & Bedsheet. I suppose the title poetically refers to the relationship between real and artificial skin, between the physical body and its imagined or virtual extensions, which is in many ways what the piece is about.

Title: Skinn & Lak

Year: 2001

Materials: A large bed cloth with a hole in it, face paint, computer animations and a video projector.

Dimensions: ca 4 × 3 × 7 meters

Duration:

Exhibition history:

Presented at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, as part of Sculpture as Object Species, a solo exhibition spanning four locations: Kummelholmen, Andy’s Gallery, Stockholm Konst at Vårberg Centrum, and Moderna Museet.

Curator at Moderna Museet: Katrin Lundquist
Initiator and caretaker: Torbjörn Johansson
Stockholm, 2022

Poliphony Festival. The Living Art Museum. 2001

Categories:

Video Installation

Animation

Music & Sound