Jules Spinatsch – Cul de Sac
Two copies of the original book have been cut up, and the 10,008 images are pasted inside a spiral shaped structure of 20 Meters long.
The Soloshow at Starmach Gallery within this year’s festival programm – SPACE OF FLOWS – features several others works in two exhbition spaces.
Introduction
Machines are looking at us. Computer-controlled cameras keep an eye on us, but often we don’t pay any attention. Moments of reality are collected, one moment not more important than another. This wealth of visual information is systematically examined and analysed to find a deviation, something faulty, or is stored for future use. In our digital society, machines have made humans redundant when it comes to surveillance. The Swiss artist Jules Spinatsch makes use of automated collected imagery and structures them differently: as a panorama, groups, or sequences of single images. Regardless of the chosen form, that range from site specific photograhic Installations to artist’s books Spinatsch’s works offer us a speculative view on reality and the chosen medias.
In the Surveillance Panorama projects, he placed automated cameras in carefully chosen arenas, for example at the Opera Ball in Vienna for Vienna MMIX (2009), at a city council meeting in Toulouse for Fabre n’est pas venu (2008) or in a watchtower in a prison in Mannheim to produce Panopticon JVA (2015). The cameras are programmed to record up to several thousand images according to a grid, and afterwards the single images are chronologically assembled into one large panorama. The result is a contradictory combination of control and failure. Asynchronous III (2012) uses the same method, referring to certain episodes in the history of nuclear technology from the Cold War to today. For Inside SAP (2016), the artist enhanced his computer-controlled camera method into a work that demonstrates its own analyses. This works feature also in Jules Spinatsch exhbition at the Starmach Gellery.
For Krakow Photomonth 2018, Jules Spinatsch developed a new presentation of his Vienna MMIX project: The Spiral Panorama. Two copies of the original book have been cut up, and the 10,008 images are pasted inside a spiral shaped wall. On the one hand, the Spiral relates to the original presentation of this work as a circular panorama, while on the other the artist surprises us with a dead end. Is it a road referencing Roman Polanski’s film Cul-de-sac (1966), as the title of this exhibition suggests, and an analogy to the overwhelming stream of data?
Text by curator Iris Sikking
Generously supported by Pro Helvetia