Split Seconds

In the installation ‘Split Seconds’, a small monitor is placed in front of a slightly larger one, with both monitors showing the same recording of wood being chopped. The image on the small monitor even includes what remains covered up in the larger image. The movements flow from one screen to the other, turning them into a whole. The wood-chopping image freezes for a ‘split second’ before and after each blow, too briefly to be perceptible to the human eye. A few stills from the video accompany the tape in an installation, perhaps as a compensation for this human shortcoming. Various levels of perception of reality are introduced indirectly – the perception of the human eye as well as that of the camera. The limits of these two means of perception are unrelentingly called into question: on the one hand, the human eye, which is unable to register each movement, on the other, that of the camera, which, with its limited scope of perception – the frame – turns out to have a much smaller range than the human eye. Split up as they are, they complement each other. The play on words implied by the title, ‘Split Seconds’, refers to the wood being split, to the image being split up, and ultimately also to perception being split.