Karina Smigla-Bobinski

The images have mushroomed in recent decades in the evolution of media. In the early 1980s, Jean Baudrillard subjected „ Simulacra
and Simulation“ to a fundamental critique. He noted a surfeit of images, which leads to a general loss of reference to reality.
The world behind it begins to become irrelevant as the experiential space, in which a differentiation between virtual and real is still
possible, increasingly dwindles. But this antagonism has become historic. The new media are not new anymore - back in the late
1990s Nicholas Negroponte proclaimed the digital revolution to be finished and viewed the later spawned technologies as a „compost
for new ideas.“ Karina Smigla - Bobinski designed SIMULACRA with exactly this historical awareness : The installation seems
crude, the devices have lost their glory, their auratic presence. The tangle of cables and wires seem like the climbing plants that
start to overgrow sunken wreckages - an association that is particularly strong due to the video. The laborious modification of the
monitors with solvent and glass scraper was called by Smigla-Bobinski herself „an analog attack on the digital images technique“.
The Virtual is an essential part of our contemporary reality. It refers to a form of existence beyond the physical world, but it carries
physical qualities in the form of a potential. The categories „real“ and „virtual“ are no indicator for the strength of an image. Zizeks
analysis of film, for example, demonstrates through a psychoanalytic perspective based on Lacan, the persistent interaction between
levels of realty, images and consciousness we encounter on our journey through an medial universe.
The decisive factor is the awareness to this interaction. In Simulacra, Smigla-Bobinski lets the viewer have a peek into her view
of the how the virtual works: in the digital video, body parts appear on a white glowing surface, but we recognise this as a person
who is swimming in a brightly lit tank filled with a milky fluid. Without the ‚seeing aid‘ the screens seem to show the empty tank, but
viewed through the film, the figure is partially visible. This results in the impression that the visual aid gives rise to the figure itself.
However, the person is always present in the monitor pixels. What is brought to light is the video in itself - a significant difference
in the context of negotiating the remuneration of virtuality and reality. A disembodied medium seems to create a body, a person.
Another illusion as an impulse for reflection lies in the arrangement of the monitors: Under the influence of the video it is almost
inevitable to not conceive the radiant square as just that space in which the person is swimming – similar to believing as a child,
that miniature people are living in or on TV. But since the same video is playing on all four screens, spatial experiences are pure
imagination.
That play of absence was done by Alphonse Allais at the end of the 19th century. He created soundless songs and monochrome
black or white images, in which only the title heralded the content. Karina Smigla-Bobinski puts the accent on the virtuality of the
absence, in the apparent emptiness a representation of something appears. It is a representation devoid of imagery, unencumbered
by the pictorial. It is a representation that shows nothing but the presentation layer itself, it is the pure light in which any
occurrence is possible. The magnifiers in SIMULACRA only let one of many possible representations emerge. SIMULACRA is a
space of experience of the interaction between the magic of the images and the intellectual understanding, with plenty of space
for critical reflection. Its kind of deconstruction - both technically and aesthetically - is aimed at easing the basic relations: between
( technical ) media and image, between picture and the pictured there, between perception and imagination. These are the gaps
from which something new can arise.