A Disaster in Three Acts
2019, installation
print on trivision, 95 x 70 x 6 cm
photos © Jana Perusich
Video © Daniel Walcher
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stills from the installation
The piece consists of digital collages that have been created on Photoshop, printed out, and then mounted onto the prisms of a rotating billboard. This advertisement device was commonly used as a commercial sign, with its rotating prisms allowing for three individual images to be displayed in a loop.
The images shown are cut into 26 slices and glued onto each individual magnetic blade. As the individual blades rotate to reveal the subsequent image, the poster snippets rustle while gently scratching against each other or some of them lock in place for just a second, causing a slight delay and thereby an interaction between the three images displayed. When used for advertisement purposes an overlap or interaction of the images is strictly avoided, as the companies are not aware of who is renting the other frames inside the shared billboard beforehand. In this piece however, a continuous narrative is created, not only through the slight delays of the prisms but especially through the images themselves and their relation to each other.
The three posters become frames of a film, overcoming the static quality of digital collages. The film like succession of images shows a driver sitting next to a domesticated cheetah in a crashing Bentley. It is not disclosed who is responsible for the crash. In an eternal loop the peaceful coexistence of owner and pet turns into the cheetah hissing at something outside of the frame and then into the catastrophic crash. Below the images, excerpts from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s „The Little Prince“ act as subtitles.
