THE SELF BEHIND THE WINDOW, Ileana Tounda Contemporary Art Center, Athens, 2024.
"In the space of linear perspective the viewer is imagined to be looking at the world
as if through a window. This window has become our habit of mind and through it
we have become a self which has learned to keep its eye upon the world.
Behind the window we have become distant and detached, a self separated and
isolated from the world, a neutral observer and recorder of the world’s events."
as if through a window. This window has become our habit of mind and through it
we have become a self which has learned to keep its eye upon the world.
Behind the window we have become distant and detached, a self separated and
isolated from the world, a neutral observer and recorder of the world’s events."
Robert Romanyshyn, “Technology as Symptom and Dream” (1989).
American psycologist Robert Romanyshyn in his book "Technology as Symptom and Dream" (1989) focuses on technology as a cultural-historical dream which, since the fifteenth century, has radically transformed our understanding of the material world and the human body. Within this shared collective dream, the self behind a window becomes a spectator who, takes leave of the body's sensuous ties to the world, and opens the path for the world to become a spectacle to be observed, measured, mapped and coded. According to Romanyshyn, technology is deeply rooted in a special kind of vision - linear perspective vision. The development of linear perspective vision has become a cultural habit of the mind and is indispensable to the emergence of our well-ordered, highly rational, technological world.
A world to be observed through cameras, screens, microscopes, telescopes and other such devices.
The works consist of three elements:
1) Photographs, in the backround, from NASA's digital archive, taken by astronauts during their missions orbiting the Earth and to the Moon, between 1961 and 1972. These quite abstract photographs can seem incomprehensible to the untrained eye - some are damaged. The photographs, in a way, present the world in its entirety, an unknown destination to be explored.
2) Space Frame is a rigid, lightweight structure constructed from interlocking struts in a geometric pattern. Space Frames can be used to span large areas with few interior supports, therefore a key element for the development of megastructures, invented by Alexander Graham Bell for his aeronautical experiments at the beginning of the 20th century. Space Frames make a measure to our technological world, a modular unit, a rigid constuction of knowledge that stands between us and the view of the world.
3) Lyrics from songs that express doubt or insecurity. Floating in the foreground, these lyrics are a recollection of personal memories - a "zoom in" to the self. The font used for all texts is Ed Ruscha's "Boy Scout Utility Modern", who's work has been a long lasting inspiration.
Curated by Galini Lazani. Photographs by Dimitris Foutris.