Karina Smigla-Bobinski

ALIAS interactive video light installation
The video installation by Karina Smigla-Bobinski is an arrangement of projections and spectators. Entering spectators
stand in front of a light flooded wall. By moving inside of the room, the spectators themselves interrupt the
light flow, shadowing the wall as the light projector is situated in the rear of the room. Inside the shadow projections
of other people get visible. They show persons in real size, whose faces betray various origins and national roots.
Standing in front of the wall one can see his own shadow filled with a person who apparently looks him into the
eyes, moving slightly as if listening heedful to him, or maybe to his thoughts only.
Thus, in the installation, the spectator meets the outline of his own figure and the same time the image of a stranger
who seems to hide behind the light wall. Moving along the wall, one can fill his own shadow-outline with different
appearances. His perception confronts images in various levels. The real shadow as the elementary image and
evidence of ones presence and then the light generated images (still in danger of being hidden by the other light) of
absent persons. If the spectator is not alone in the room, he sees the other persons around him and their shadows
interact strangely as well.
Plato‘s Allegory of the Cave
(illustration by Mats Halldin)
In Platos allegory of the cave the shadows that the people see projected against the cave wall present a metaphor
for the different levels of knowledge. The different modes of knowledge are illustrated through different modes of
perception in a hierarchy between light and shadow: the world of the ideal forms is the domain of light, which can
dazzle somebody if unprepared. At the same time the shadows of these ideal forms are the only thing the people
conceive as their reality.
The cave is a world of semidarkness, the kingdom of shadows.
Without taking it too far one can see the similarities between the two concepts, the allegory of the cave and Karina
Smigla-Bobinskis installation: The well thought through structure, the trias of light, shadows and darkness, the isolation
in the cave and the inside of the „white cube“ gallery and maybe most important the relation between object
and image - the significance of images.
Plato presents a dialectic order of the world, Smigla-Bobinski puts all images and objects into one light space.
Through the outshining of the projections by the white light, presence and visibility get decoupled. Created and
destroyed by the same medium, light, the video images need a recipient for their sensual unfolding. This recipient
is the visitor, one could go as far as to call the visitor the medium, who makes these video people visible through
his own silhouette.
Ultimately the installation can be understood as a beautiful metaphor for the dependency of art: without a viewer
or visitor it is trapped in an incomplete existence.