Being not truthful
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Ralph Ammer and Stefan Sagmeister have teamed up to create an installation which was first exhibited at Austrian Cultural Forum last week in NYC. It uses the aphorism Being not truthful works against me taken from Sagmeister's diary Things I have learned in my life so far. Like many of his works, it is a handwritten sentence which is being reproduced in an unusual way. The words, generatively built up in form of a spiderweb through a custom software developed by Ralph Ammer, are projected on a wall. The installation also includes a small camera which is filming the area in front of the projection in order to create a mirror-like situation. The spiderweb is being superimposed on the live image and when a person moves in front of the screen, he or she warps the web until it beautifully rips apart. After the person is gone, the web will gradually rebuild and the maxim lasts until the next disturbance. The piece seeks to question both the notion of truthfulness as such and the general issue of turning a statement into a rule, even if just a personal one: "This fragile construction serves as a metaphor for the vulnerability of the maxim and the effort to perpetuate it. In a sense it is "physically" questioned by everybody who passes and damages it." Video (9 mb) |
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If interested in the relationship between human contact and spider habitat, check out Nina Katchadourian's work 'Mended spiderweb'. She, the human contact, physically seeks to repair broken spider webs. In the Brown and Edinburgh University joint Atopia Journal publication "Gap/overlap" Nina explains how "the repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned." It is interesting to see that our perception of 'repair' translates in to 'invasion' for the spider. This underlines the reality that our own truth and knowledge may not always translate in the same way for others. In this case, symbollically, the spider. Nina Katchadourian's work is a more literal demonstration of the metaphor stated for the installation "Being not Truthful."