World5 / installation

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Photos by Amit Geron

Installation views:

350 meter of red led ropes, video 3d animation in 4 channels, flicker light, fog generator, sound, sound speakers

World5

Ran Slavin’s exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art comprises several video, sound, and light installations that present a fragmented, cyclical image unfolding simultaneously across multiple spaces. The museum’s large gallery, normally illuminated through its unique ceiling windows, has been sealed and darkened by the artist. Within this space, flickering artificial light—split screens, red LED lines, strobing effects, and dispersed fog—creates an immersive, ever-shifting environment.

Slavin employs his distinctive visual language to explore humanity’s disconnection from natural time, presenting technological space and temporality as reflections of the virtual and digital age. The title World5 evokes both the historical classification of nations into First, Second, and Third Worlds and the naming conventions of speculative science-fiction worlds. In Slavin’s vision, this world exists outside the cycles of sun and earth, beyond the natural order of day and night, activity and rest. It is a 24/7 realm, echoing Jonathan Crary’s critique in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), in which contemporary capitalism demands constant availability and readiness to serve a global, corporate logic.

The exhibition conveys this fragmentary, simultaneous vision through four films in the main gallery—each split into multiple strips—and an additional installation, Kiosk, in a separate room. Navigating this flickering environment is like wandering a galactic planetarium or observing an unknown target from a control room. Slavin’s 3D images draw from sci-fi landscapes, virtual gaming aesthetics, and digital platforms, processed through multi-layered editing and post-production effects. The camera leads viewers through exterritorial cyberspace, populated by mechanical bodies, relic objects, and symbolic or digital signs.

The resulting world is at once mesmerizing and disorienting—charged with dark mystery, seduction, and danger, at the intersection of beauty and alienation. It oscillates between fullness and emptiness, stillness and intensity, utopia and dystopia, offering a meditation on our place within a technological cosmos that is always active, always observed, and always in flux.

Curated by Aya Lurie

Photos above by Tal Nisim

Ran Slavin
World5Version 2, 2016
Installation, mixed media
Courtesy of the artist

Ran Slavin’s video installation at the Haifa Museum of Art is comprised of a number of video sources, electronic, digital, sound, and light objects (the work’s first version was shown at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year). Together they combine and form a fragmented installment occurring intensively, simultaneously, and repetitively, in a number of locations. The project reflects a technologically, culturally, ethically, and aesthetically complex portrait of the present with respect to time, place, and space. Slavin works with layered digital 3-D animation, reflecting on the experience of our disconnection from natural time. He proposes a technological space and time capsule as a sensorial space, reflecting the virtual-digital age.
The project’s title echoes the common categorization of the world’s countries into “first,” “second,” and “third worlds,” according to parameters such as regime, economy, and technological progress. World 5, Version 2 is a virtual world no longer dependent on representational or photographic strategies. In it, time deviates from the natural order and is no longer dependent on the orbits of the sun and Earth, which determine a 24 hours per day cycle divided hours into light and dark. This world is a binary, uninterrupted one. Multi-screen, fragmented, electricity-dependent, and characterized by technological excess and information. It is spread out in arrays of screens, projections, sound and light objects creating a multi-screen heterotopic arrangement with winding nets, exposed electrical bearings, computerized graphics, light strips and electronic units attached to each other provisionally, with office paper clips.
World 5, Version 2 proposes a contemplation of a flickering, ever-changing space with awe and enchantment. Three -dimensional images of mechanical bodies and ancient landscapes interspersed with abstract multi-layered digital models are placed in landscapes recalling science fiction and virtual aesthetics. This world offers different parallel possibilities, for which there is no structured “proper” course of viewing or understanding. It is a simultaneous, hybrid utopian world, characterized by movement between the physical and the digital with no beginning, middle or end, between electronic music and temporal light scapes.

Curated by Svetlana Reingold