GLOW - forum of light in art and architecture
Eindhoven, Netherlands. November 9 – 18, 2007

PARKLANDSCHAFTEN
Luedenscheid, Germany. September 16 – 26, 2005

Multi-storey car park, video loop,
loop duration: 40 minutes,
6 – 8 video projectors,
stereo sound system,
projection size: 23 x 2.15 meters,
water surface/pond foil: 23 x 4 meters

SHINE ON is a video/sound installation which uses very specific particles of movies – displaced from their usual context – to create an intense moment of ecstasy.

The exclusive focus on video clips and sounds of explosions evokes an enormous suction and dynamic which even gets increased by the manipulation of the material.

Over decades Hollywood celebrated violence, war and destruction as entertainment and embodied it in our consciousness as normality.
SHINE ON was developed already before 9/11 (first shown in small festival in the castle at Katzelsdorf/Austria, June 2001), but those events and further impacts of the last years extended the installation by an oppressive dimension: Reality.
The brief thinking break in Hollywood after the impacts in Manhatten were soon followed by a returning to 'business as usual'. Violence still seems to be the "mega seller", perhaps today even more than before 9/11.

How does this constant confrontation with violence and destruction affect our perception and our (sub)consciousness?

Above all these questions lurk behind the aesthetic qualities of SHINE ON.
Whereby the title also alludes to spiritual associations: Big Bang, enlightenment, end of the world ...

Klaus Obermaier