A spectator who walks into the ring and influences, via his or her electromagnetic presence, a theremin (a predecessor of the synthesizer, and one of the first electronical musical instruments) which in turn controls the order of the cameras.

In this way one pcan manipulate the perspective and the timing sequence of the projected video image by walking around in the space.

The installation continues to surpise by its strange deformations of time. Sometimes present and past seem to melt into one. One is at the same time both director and actor, conductor and musician, or, if you like, guard and observed in one.

The "Encounter" series explores the concept of interaction with the viewer and as such forms a stadium in a development towards something like interactive cinema.

A central element here is a chair, inviting to be seated in. Ofcourse never more than one - real or virtual - person can be sitting in the chair! The elusive virtual visitors manage to steer away from collisions and keep their distance. In this way they make us experience the tension between, on the one hand, the frustratingly unattainable ideal of real contact, and, on the other hand, the safe certainty of avoiding conflicts.

The relation viewer-space-work is made even more interesting because the artist (never completely absent in a work of art) here is actually present as a virtual visitor. And if there are more viewers present an extra exciting dimension is added: who is virtual, and who is not?

Turning the handle on the desk results in the appearance of a projected light bulb. If one continues to turn, the light emanated from the bulb becomes brighter and brighter, until finally from the light a video image comes forward. This video image is either a Time Stretcher (like in "Albert's Ark" , 1990) or an image of the space around the desk in which time goes backwards, depending on the turning direction of the handle.

This work depends on the curiosity of the viewer: if the viewer does not explore, there will be nothing to see - in this way the curiosity of the viewer parallels that of the physicist!

The image of the light bulb ties together several related elements: the electricity generated by turning the handle, the light that places a central role in relativity theory, and the light bulb from a projector, that, in this context, is not the cause of the projected image, but the projected image itself.

The machine is only lit by LED lamps, which, controlled by a computer, flicker in various frequencies. In this sparse and changeable light, you see a construction which consists of a combination of wheels resembling film reels, in various sizes, and broad belts which connect the wheels and make them turn at high speed. The construction moves like an old-fashioned mechanism, while on the belts - strips of paper - images can be seen of a small hovering figure which makes flying movements.

However, there is something amiss in The Logic of Life: the direction of the movement and the speed of the images and wheels change, they are unpredictable, illogical, and inconsistent with the construction of the machine. They sometimes seem to turn in the wrong direction. Contrary to what our modern machinery is usually trying to make us believe, this machine seems to function anything but flawlessly.

The Logic of Life is reminiscent of a viewing machine from the 19th century, and also derives its power from the mystery of the moving image, from the tension between reality and fiction. What do you really see? What are you looking at? The machine plays the viewer's expectations off against itself. It cannot be a coincidence that the flapping figure in the images recalls heroic but ill-fated attempts to fly, or the fall of Icarus. And then there is the fact that this lonely flyer is also the image of the artist himself...

Whether we are at the bank, at an airport, in a museum or a supermarket, our presence is nearly always being registered and checked upon as if we were all potential criminals.

The dream of the technological society in which we exercise 'supervision over our environment is at the same time a nightmare in which the machinery observes us and spies on us. The question is, in fact, what is the all-seeing video eye trying to unearth, and in service to whom? Who or what is being protected? To a certain extent, our monitoring machines also reflect our glance, and so, ironically, we are trying to escape from our own self-designed 'evil' eye, which at the same time seems to lead a life of its own and appears to be controlled by an unknown quantity.

Big Brother is watching you. He usually spies on you in secret, but the interactive installation I/Eye overtly leers at you and other passers-by. I/Eye is a giant eye which completely fills the screen of a video monitor. It not only looks at you, it follows you and moves with you. Initially you think you are the viewer, the one who has the initiative in this looking game, but then you discover that you are being watched as well. For I/Eye, Spinhoven filmed his own eye in a great many different positions, which, by means of a computer programme, respond to the momentary and 'real life' shots of the viewer. Eye-to-eye with I/Eye, you bodily experience what it feels like to be observed and followed, almost like a thing. An ambiguous experience, to say the least.

But there is an even more specific issue - which is either more or less conspicuous depending on where you are and the context in which I/Eye manifests itself: this is also about your role as an art viewer, which has accustomed you to besieging and conquering the work of art with your interpretive, classifying and aestheticizing glance. With I/Eye, art takes its revenge and stares back relentlessly, as if it is revolting against its passive, subservient position as a posed exhibition object. The glance of the victimized viewer is undermined by the shameless gaze of the work of art, which, against all convention, is itself trying to master the art of observing and reverses the familiar roles.

I/Eye lays bare a dark side of technological and telematic society, and at the same time forces the observer to look at art and him/herself with different eyes.

The debt to Einstein, the great scientific theoretician who fundamentally changed our conceptions of time and space, was already acknowledged in Albert's Ark (1990).

This work is an even more explicit ode to Einstein. On the wall there is a small portrait of Einstein, accompanied by a citation on the relation between science and art. Art is also present in the form of a violinconcert from Mozart, which was one of Einstein's favorites.

And the rotating clock does not just record scientific time, but also is remeniscent of the artist Dali. Scientists and artists have contributed to the atmosphere of this work, and the boundaries between the two disciplines seems to be blurred here, as both make us aware that the human lifeworld is necessarily conditioned by the fact that it takes place in time and space.

The monitor being placed in a sober, minimal way on a flight case, seems to playfully underline this: look, this work has travelled, through time and space...

On closer inspection, it strikes you that there is movement in the tubes, in the form of greeny spots of light.

When scrutinised even more closely, the tubes turn out to be alternative cathode-ray tubes - each tube consists of only four lines from a moving video image. But what are you actually looking at? What kind of images are these? It takes concentration and time to find out that you are looking at fragments of faces, alongside, below and above each other.

The images have been subdivided over the two tubes, which are like parts of a large, imaginary video screen. Therefore, you do not see the portraits as a whole, but as if you were scanning the images through two slits. As if you were screwing up your eyes to gain an insight into something very 'difficult'. Only in your mind can you fill in the images and turn them into a whole. It is as if you have to learn to observe all over again; as if you have to rediscover how a meaningful image takes shape.

Untitled #5 takes on an extra dimension if you know that this is actually a self-portrait of Spinhoven, that this is his own image. According to a theory from psychology, identity is not primarily the result of self-reflection, but rather of the image that other people have of you...

A very dark room, one short side illuminated by the projection of a closed human eye. A pulpit is placed near the middle of the room, on it lies an open book.

Nearing the pulpit a bird is scared out of its hiding place, flying around in the dark and land. When at the pulpit, the book appears to be the I Tjing. The eye opens.

Now looking at the projection of the eye, the eye starts moving across the screen, leaving traces from reflections in the eye's pupil.

The traces slowly form an I Tjing sign. Might want to look it up.

While Gyro Gearloose has always been able to enjoy the luxury of a small flying saucer, with its technical gadgets perfectly geared to his bizarre inventor's mind, nobody has ever made a vehicle to match Einstein's genius. Just recently, however, somebody has, and the prototype is called Albert's Ark. Albert's Ark is a cross between a large sundial mode of stone and on ultra-modern, opened-out 'video clock'. Because the colossus is opened-out and shows its intricate inner mechanism, it evokes the suggestion that the pseudo old-fashioned sundial is just as advanced inside as an atomic clock. The monitor of the 'video clock', however, does not show the time, but the impact of time on space. The viewer walking around the installation will, at a certain point, see the distorted image of his body on the monitor. By trying out various movements, he will literally be able to wriggle into the strongest postures.

He can turn his body into a spiral, he can stretch it out like a piece of elastic. Even the simplest movements have the effect that the ideal, coherent image of his body is disrupted. Due to this, the installation has an ironical undertone. Because, as the title already indicates, this is not just any vehicle, it is an ark- But was Noah's Ark not built to save him with his family and livestock from the Flood, and to lead them all safe and sound into a new God-fearing era? This ark, however, that of Einstein, is aimed at the reverse: not safe and sound but deformed do the viewers end up on the godforsaken screen, not piety but bewilderment is the result of watching their own bodies 'spread out' in space.

Whereas the flat screen normally presents us with the projection of a three-dimensional body, Albert's Ark shows us the projection of a body with four dimensions. Due to this, the body can be observed at different times simultaneously and due to this it can spread out in space in this way. The live-aspect of the installation is not only important because movement and distortion are thus related directly to each other, but also because the passing of time is only visible when there are 'signs of life', when a viewer ventures to come near this machine. The installation is a kind of vitality defector, separating the animate from the inanimate, the alive from the dead.

In order to make the impact of time on space visible, Bill Spinhoven developed the Time Stretcher in 1988. The fact that nowhere in space is time identical- although the differences are only perceptible on a cosmic scale - intrigued him so much that he worked out a machine capable of enlarging these trifling differences to a human scale. The time Stretcher functions as a magnifying glass, allowing us a glance into the fourth dimension (indeed, another installation in which Bill Spinhoven applied his Time Stretcher is called Look Out Into the fourth Dimension).

However, there are two disturbing 'inessentials' which emerge when the viewer lets himself be carried away by this 'time machine'. The first is that Albert's Ark completely unsettles the causality of things. When you drop an object, it appears to rise up on the monitor. This implies that the speed of the object is greater than the speed of light, for only then can it move in the opposite direction and travel to the past. Of course this does not tally at all with physical reality. Not without reason, the proposition still holds that the speed of light is absolute and that nothing can go faster. But then, what demonic machine is this that speeds us up in such a way that we can escape the absolute of absolutes?

The second 'inessential' is equally staggering. We have always relied on a mirror for a photo or television image) to give us a representative and true-to-life image of ourselves. The distorting mirror is in fact a cautious, low tech undermining of this image, whereas Albert's Ark radically puts an end to this illusion. We will have to recognise that the stretched-out bodies on the monitor are our true selves. To grasp this appearance in its entirety, we must make use of what relativists call the world line, the orbit of a body through a four-dimensional universe of space and time. The time Stretcher can only make a small part of this orbit visible. But imagine the possibility of watching your world line, from birth to death, in all its magisterial, misshapen and impenetrable configuration, very slowly pass by on the screen. That would be the absolute spectacle of time. (MN)

THE SKULL THEATRE

Because images are projected onto both of the screens at once, one of the two images is always hidden from the viewer. This image 'illuminates' the back of the viewer's head. It's different from that which is being projected on the screen in front of the viewer. The images tell a story about the four elements. Four geometric figures correspond to the elements: water to the circle, earth to the square, air to a double ellipsoid and fire to the triangle. One doesn't find out whether geometry here forms an ideal attribute of matter or the elements are real attributes of geometric concepts. Each element is represented in an image sequence of its own by means of a number of elementary geometrical mechanisms: for example, the earth appears in the brick facade of a house, or the teeth of a rake when it textures the grounds surface in a square pattern. Water appears as a wheel and as a sprinkler, air as a cloud or on a butterfly in the clouds. And fire appears, among other things, as a burning triangle, or on the head of a match which is struck diagonally across the image. This machinery of each element is accompanied by a corresponding sequence of images in the screen opposite, in which an element's geometrical figure appears against a black background: a sort of 'static' of white image-points which forms the figure, flat one moment, showing only the contours the next, finally disintegrating into a whirling swarm which forms itself into a transitional figure. Each screen shows a geometrical sequence followed by one representing an element, such that the two alternate; for example, the stroboscopic circle which follows the element earth. Thus, the story of the elements changes from screen to screen after each sequence, as does the story of the geometrical figures. At the end of each sequence, one sees a transitional image in which the disappearing and appearing geometric figure come together, on both screens simultaneously, but such that one screen remains white where the other is black. This indicates that one screen is the negative of the other: neither is designated negative or positive, however. Two screens, then: the representation of the elements and the geometric figures, both in flowing sequences. One in front of, and one behind, the head of the viewer. And then the sound: the sound of the elements and the sound of the machines, sound which makes one aware of the hidden image, makes it a volume between two planes, a sonorous matter which is the medium between the areas in front of and behind the head. So that the image is always double and removed from itself, like a split and splitting thought.

The eye is a window. Each window an eye, a surface where two worlds meet. The screen is an eye, as well. For example, in a film. In a film, the order of the everyday world is interrupted, the order in which you meet the world with your will. In blackness, in the night of the film theatre, this relationship is reflected: it is the world which sees and possesses you, which conceives you as an actor and pulls the strings of your performance in this skull theatre. The perspective of the film eye is nothing more than the cross section and reflection, the minimal distance in front of the mirror which the world holds up to itself in you. In this installation, rather, one is always between the screens. The illusion of a perspectivistic representation, of a privileged look into the depth of matter is absent completely. In a film, the world confronts one frontally, and one is unconsciously conquered by it; here, it pounces upon one from behind, as well. This confrontation is hidden from actual view because the frons , the frons scenae or the window is constantly shifting from front to back and back again. A 'trans-frontation', it might be called, this unbearable game of ricochets in which the image's trajectory passes directly through one and is endlessly reflected between two screens. As opposed to the film's art of immediacy, which occupies one entirely, one remains 'conscious', present at something which, in turn, is using one to accomplish itself. It's as though the second screen is constantly presenting itself into the corner of one's eye. Thus, one becomes a speculative thought oneself, a transparent speculum, ones looking consciousness becomes a modern mirror-glass in which one sees oneself being reflected while the world looks through one. But just spin around. What does the other screen see? Does it see you, the viewer? Of course not, it's looking through you at its double, too, saying something about the right of the first screen. Together, they observe this right on your retina. Around about you, and, nonetheless, in you as well. They shoot their considerations straight through the orb of your eye. As we've said, the one screen holds the mathematical-geometrical form of the other. A square is lit up like a sort of stroboscopic figure; on the other screen the end of a loaf of bread is seen, also almost a square. Something is being measured, checked, weighed: but what, exactly? Is geo-metry taking the earths measure, or is the earth taking the weight of these measuring instruments? And who comes first? Or: are they both weighing you, the weight of your thoughts, are they weighing them with the addled metric standard which you thought was invented by people themselves? This is the thought which is being shot through one, constantly.

THE MIRROR-HOLLOWS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

At the beginning of each new image sequence describing the mechanism of an element, an eye appears. This eye describes, with obvious awkwardness, the corresponding geometrical figure upon the front of ones own sight-orbs. Or: it traces it, sees it projected right through your skull onto your retina as a message from the other side. Shot across the Mind. A skull with three or four eyes. And an ear. The ear passes it on: the message, the hiatus from the other half. A sign which is disturbing because it's still empty, and must be filled with thoughts. The ear sets your sound-board and shoots the sound straight through it as a wave of matter. The ear fills the eye, fills the skull with the elements. A match flares, fire behind the eye. Water seeps like a thin stream through the hemispheres of one's inner world, between the folds of the walnut of your thinking. The wheel flushes the water as a spiraling column through the brain: trepanation. The voice of the elements sounds the images in the head like a sonar. Carried along at right angles to the bundles of projection, on the vector of light, they blow air like a flute through the head. From ear to ear. It's the eye of the world cutting a path through your thinking. The measure of geometry seems no more than a stubborn daydream: stroboscopic photons soon to be sown into static. The earth measures one's time: The skull becomes a geologic formation in which geometric forms seem to be glowing fossils from some other, long past millennium. Perhaps time is stretched here, the split second of seeing takes an age, the age of erosion or evolution. It's this stone time which is being struck with the blows of a sledge-hammer in your head, searching for the last mirror-hollows in which consciousness has hidden itself. It's been proposed that the importance accorded the audio-visual media in our times, the privilege of the organs of sight and hearing corresponds to the era of representative thought (a kind of thought which would involve a complete interiorising of the world, in a Hegelian sense, a way of thinking that would lose, firstly, matter, the world of the elements, the nature of the machine). The charm of an installation like Shot across the Mind is probably that it doesn't deny this simple fact, but, rather, shows this world of elements in an idealized form, an extra mirror in which the speculative mind, that great sublimating organ, should be able to contemplate its own end, not the shining end which it may have set its hopes on, but rather the slow fall through a mirror from which the quicksilver had already been eaten away by the time of the elements.This is all perhaps a bit too general. In a certain sense, one can even say that that other great audio-visual medium, the film, the post-war film in particular, had reached such a point. What, then, are the specific possibilities of video, and to what extent are they put to use here?

THE MIND WITHOUT WINDOWS

In the seventeenth century we learned that the earth is a sphere, rotating around others. As, likewise, the entire universe was. We were also taught that, turned inside out, this sphere was already present, complete and perfect, in our own heads. That, in order to see oneself, no window should be necessary. That your inner eye simply cast its light on your little piece of world, inside there. This is all preserved in Leibniz's concept of the 'monade', the soul without windows. Every perception in the hollow of your soul, every representation was a change of lighting, in that sphere, that sfera , that ball in your head. You're locked up in your soul or your mind without windows. Around you, the world with its mechanisms, machine-organic or mechanical nature progressing from cause to effect and so on, further, in the abundance of the elements, each movement becoming another one as an effect, causa efficiens , and thus, forming whole chains: from the stars to your cells, from China to Holland, everything decided in materiam , in advance. And when you perceived all that in the inner world of your monade, it was only because of God's plan, causa finalis , the correct division of all monades in God s representation as a final comprehensive monade, and because of the harmony which was established between the two domains in advance: the domain of inner perception, and that of nature, outside. And, thus, not because of the contact between you and the world; the control of the world by your will is a perfect illusion, and you are no more than a spiritual machine. Leibniz saw all that as the antinomy of the hollow of thought and the fullness of the universe. Gilles Deleuze, in his two books on cinema (L'image mouvement/L'image temps) describes the film as a monadological art par excellence, the art of the spiritual machine. Probably, one can go even further and say that, in general perception in our century is the inner perception of the monade, which, lacking a God, no longer corresponds to the mechanics of the world. Film, then, could be considered as being only the type of this desynchronisation of perception. Not only in the movie theatre (stepping out of the world and entering into a monadic mechanism), but also in the film itself, which remains tied to the perspectivistic ideality of the camera-eye, the light-cone which illuminates our little piece of the world, a transparent world, one without materiality. Certainly, as we've said, the film has gone to extremes in attempting to go beyond this perspectivistic ideality by cutting through the eye, the inner, automatic eye of the monadic spectator as a material theatre, that is, as the stasis of a postponed or broken immediacy. (Not only the films of Tarkovsky, in which the eye moves through the ruins of thought to be overpowered by the echo's of matter, echo's which measure the tactile inside of the earth, but also the glass of milk which is turned over and spills across the image, the completely blank perception in Hitchcock.) And yet, the film shall always remain bound to frontality, even when it returns the world to us as a distance, as a material play space, as in the films of Godard, which show us a nature which has been cut up and re-shuffled; will remain bound to the opposition of eye to world, whether in the deepest penetration or the most absolute denial. Even in the case of the turning-about of the perspective of the monade, in the sight-cone which is filled with matter and is supposed to bring an opaque world with it, seeing remains bound to a frontal, 'organic' conception of the eye, the eye as a single section of the world. Its difficult to even estimate the extent to which this limit of film has already been exhausted, but its clear, in any case, that the video installation has opened up the possibility of the inclusion of a whole other domain (just like, e.g., the hologram). A domain in which seeing is no longer tied to frontality, to the frons , the fronton that will always remain that of the (farewell to) the representation.

THE EARTH AS AGIGANTIC VISION

The power of an installation like Shot across the Mind is to be found in the fact that it explores this domain beyond frontality, from the point at which the film has left us (simply because the specific possibilities of video only become visible at that point)_ From the point at which matter itself has become a thought, the world itself has become thinking, which comes towards us in all of its massivity or recedes in silence (the stillness of Ozu, the receding spaces of Duras which the word has lost its hold on)_ Its precisely this kind of image which returns as the image of the element, the element which conquers the image as a turning-around of perspective. Eye which is filled with water, fire, earth and air. Horizon which is hidden from the eye in the gaze perpendicular to the earth s surface or the moving surface of the water, it's the world in its most elementary shape which appears here. The match's fire, the wheel's water, the earth which, in its cultivation, gives us a loaf of bread, the butterfly as a flying machine, they're all registered as res extensa , as a geometrically measurable, mechanical and machine-like nature. It's just this screen-filling extensiveness which is the consummate remembrance of the world as the opponent of the monade. But it's in precisely this doubling of the window, in front of and behind the viewer, that the world also shoots its thought through you, that the retina of things is pulled through you and the earth as pupil enters, the earth as a gigantic vision. And, likewise, one shoots the monadic perception outside, the intellectual hollow is shot through the fullness of things. One turns the monade inside out like a glove: thoughts escape and travel across your skull, backwards and forwards, like nomads, like meridians along the cheekbones and the ears, like points of light, they wander in geometric orbits around your head and measure the pattern of thought and the emptiness of the vanished universe there, your soul is 'lit up' with a fluttering of clouds, your mind crucified with four little posts; your arrid daydream is sprinkled with circling moisture pumped up out of the depths of echoing wells. Seeing is no longer the eye's single section, not the perception of the monade, nor of the world which looks into one; is no longer a frontality in which one of the two eyes has the most weight, no, here, in between the screens, the head becomes permeable, as in a universal perception, a sequence of sections, not only of time (as in the film) but also in space, as though one wasn't sitting in front of a cathode ray tube (like the TV), but had gotten lost inside of it. This may be the perception spoken of by Bergson, a perception without a privileged cut (consciousness, subjectivity), a seeing and thinking of extensiveness, of the res extensa itself. In any case, this looking into the fourth dimension, as it was called, with a certain pathos, in Bill Spinhoven's last video, has become visible here as a thought. What are we to do with such a massive thought, here at the close of the Hegelian era? In the removal of the dimensions of the exterior (described so masterfully in hyperbolic form in Paul Virilio's work), in the general sublimination of space and time for which light remains their only boundary, the light of the absolute mind, in the vacuum of this ideality, the world will one day be shot back as a gigantic mass: shot across the mind across the world across the mind.

(text Mediamatic by Sam Sturkenboom)