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 by curator Aya Lurie:

Ran Slavin’s exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art is composed of several video, sound, and light installations. Together, they present a split image that transpires intensively and cyclically in several places simultaneously. The museum’s large gallery, whose unique ceiling windows allow daylight to penetrate, has been sealed and darkened by the artist. Within the gallery there is endless flickering artificial light originating in split screens, red LED light lines, flicker lights and fog dispersion. Slavin uses his unique artistic language to contemplate the meaning of our disconnection from natural time, presenting technological space and time as an all-encompassing reflection of the virtual and digital age. The installation title resonates with the common classification of countries into First, Second, and Third World countries by parameters such as regime, economy and technological progress – as well as familiar forms of Science-Fiction world names. World5 is a virtual world whose place is indefinite and whose time is beyond the natural order. It is no longer contingent on the given rotation of the sun and earth, by which 24 hours per day are determined as well as hours of light and darkness, of activity and rest. World5 is a world without breaks, a 24/7 world, as Jonathan Crary titled his book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013). Crary maintains that contemporary capitalism requires us to be alert, readily available to anyone at any time – on the cell phone, mail, or Skype – and ever-ready to serve uniform, global, corporate business. The exhibition presents a fragmentary, simultaneous image of this world through the four films on view in the large gallery, each of which is split into multiple strips, and an additional installation, Kiosk, on view in another room in the museum.
Watching this flickering space is like wandering around a galactic planetarium or like surveillance of some unknown target from a Control Room. The 3-D images created by the artist are anchored in Sci-Fi landscapes and the aesthetics of virtual games and digital web platforms, which have been processed using multi-layer picture editing techniques and post-production special effects software. The viewer travels with the camera through an exterritorial cyber space governed by mechanical bodies and old objects combined with symbolic and digital signs. Together, they produce a cosmological fascination charged with dark mystery and informed by enticement and danger, beauty and alienation. This world straddles the gamut from fullness to emptiness, from meditative stillness to intensity, from utopia to dystopia.

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