ANGELA HAREITER

Architect and set designer Angela Hareiter creates a space situated between movie prop and installation. bulb was commissioned for the exhibition as a construction to evoke the character of a film set, and to simultaneously represent a trace and remainder of the technologies embedded inside of the cinematic apparatus. As if the space containing the installation was a camera optic, zooming in onto one object, the viewer is confronted with an over-sized film lamp: an uncanny special-effect generating apparatus, an emanation of an (architectural) sub-conscious mind. As the first, modernist version of cinema as primarily visual apparition has come to an end, its phenomena are understood to belong to a text which asks to be read and decoded in ever new ways. This text charts a terrain of literal and symbolic translation processes and practices.

bulb as a spatial configuration represents a theatrical framework for the filmless set of the exhibition-as-film, to focus on issues of film light and special effect, projection and screen (here, in a pun, represented by the magazine format). Projections are understood to be the result of always newly exchangeable differences, which are produced by the same mechanics in order to discuss identities in different ways. bulb bridges the gap between projection and emission, between cinema screen and monitor surface, and symbolically connects the light source of the film projector to the cathode ray tube’s oscillations. At the same time, bulb reflects the shadow of an architectural terminology inscribed throughout the building, as it connects to the spatial relations of the cupola’s orbit embraced as an invisible, vertical floor plan formulating the exhibition’s spatial grammar.

This contribution renders cinema in terms of its architectural elements, to suggest a projection space without a projection, and to allow for a movement inside of the apparatus. Hareiter’s object is part of and illuminates this temporary constellation. It foregrounds the notion of cinema not as device to project largerthan-life moving images onto a screen, but as a system of different signals and sources, a cosmology of transmissions and emissions. (CR)