you are here | you are there

Optical installation

Peepholes, mirror, lightboxes with Google Earth snapshots in 3D stereo arrangement

2008

you are here | you are there

Technical basics
The location of the Marks Blond Project Gallery is photographed from two parallel standpoints in Google Earth. These photos are installed in the exhibition on lightboxes, but are distorted in accordance with the optical constellations so that, from a central viewpoint, both photos in concert yield a three-dimensional image.

Artistic aspects
From the press release published by Marks Blond Project: “Europe, Switzerland, Bern, Main Station, Speichergasse, number 8, entries to the right and left of the new Marks Blond Project showroom, the doors, each with a peephole, a kind of double window; we look through and see: one and the same Speichergasse […]. [W]e compare the images: yes, we are really seeing Marks Blond Project, and suddenly it seems as if we are looking over our own shoulder at what we’re seeing; the observer is also the observed. Can we perhaps even identify ourselves in the photo? Haven’t we long since become part of this simulated scenery, which is now unmistakably impinging on the real world? What is this? A satire on self-control? A satellite picture in real time? […] The photographed landscape becomes plastic here, the geological relief modelled by the River Aar, atop which the city of Bern is perched, can be clearly identified. […] By subtly interweaving objectivity and poetry, Florian Dombois once again shows us the lyrical side of technology, those moments when at first glance we quite literally can’t believe our eyes. The various and overlapping claims to reality give rise to grotesques […] – top view and profile meld, surface and space are fused. Out of 2x2 3D photographs of Speichergasse partial views emerge that – at once ephemeral and lasting, at once abstract and real – generate a multidimensional reality.”

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