Fragile Territories

Audiovisual laser installation [2012,2016,2019]

What defines a territory? Where does a line start and end? Who occupies which space and when? How do we negociate and navigate a shared space? Fragile Territories uses four lasers, each contributing to a complex and mutating visual shape, overlapping lines, rigid grids, loose shortcuts, A painting of light, osciallating between static geometry and fluent ephemeral strokes of color.

Sometimes the shapes are barely visible, sometimes they explode into extreme brightness. In some sequences the quality of the light is steady, during other times it fluctuates and breaks apart into scintillating particles. The installation is based on a set of stochastic operations whith feedback loops, resulting in slow and chaotic variations that influence the drawing and the sound.

The sonic source material consists of transformed piano notes and small high frequency mechanical noises. Their articulation changes in sync with the visual developments.

Whilst everything is floating and changing in rather long time intervals, a black shadow seems to be moving in front of the projection, from left to right, every six seconds, like a giant blade of a windmill. It defines a negative object that contrasts the bright projection by muting it where it appears.

It is not only obscuring the image, but also dampening the sounds at its current position and is emitting a low frequency noise:

The things that are not visible are more powerful than the ones you see.

Since the visual and the auditive sequences are created in realtime using stochastic algorithms the duration of the work is infinite. It never repeats, and the exact behaviour is unpredictable.

Fragile Territories was commissioned by Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France. It uses four custom lasers made by LaserAnimation Sollinger in Berlin.

Fragile Territories won the International Laser Display Association (IDLA) Award 2013.