PRELUDE

People observed from a distance. They amble, walk without any apparent goal, or jog. They seem unencumbered, like tourists or families out for a Sunday stroll in the park. The site that they traverse, however, is simply an empty, bright surface. Only the paths are sketchily indicated, a strict geometric plan. All of the sounds are also erased, and thereby possible indications of the location. Prelude is a playful and likewise concentrated hidden image picture that offers numerous references to other media, such as photography and architecture, to other epochs of the moving image, and to new technologies.

The people and their hinted-at surroundings seem just as transparent and pale as Walter Niedermayr’s photographs of the Titlis glacier in Switzerland. Here, rather than the ski area, we are dealing with what is certainly a different leisure area: a pedestrian zone or a park. The space emerges solely through the movements and behavior of the people passing through it. Its “invisibility” makes it that much clearer as a frame of reference. Fragments of dialogue as subtitles recall the narrative element of early cinema, as though bits of conversations snatched from passersby, which nonetheless remain just as mysterious as the site and thereby the context of the setting.

Prelude is the name of a self-teaching conversation program that works with pattern recognition, or random generators. Perhaps the title of the video is not just an indication of how the dialogue was created, but also stands for the design of an interactive system, for example here, of spaces, patterns of movement, and communication, illustrating the blending of real and virtual components at one of our era’s many non-sites.

Andrea Pollach