Although the work of Magdalena Pederin is visually attractive, it is anything but the confirmation of modernism’s thesis of the self – sufficiency of the visual. The “Wall of Light”, as the artist calls it, is made of the enlarged LED meters, and the configurations of two lights of different colours on this wall function as a graphic display of the intensity of the sound being recorded by a particular piece of equipment. The frequency and the speed of change is manifested by changes in the quantity of colour of light. It is a matter of incessant changes, as confirmed by the “Wall of Light” itself.
This work is not intended to be an object requiring the perception of its formal and technological characteristics. The object exhibited in the exhibition space is only an instrument of mediation in the process of perception, and incites one to observe the manifestations of one’s own bodily movements. In fact, it is the observer who, in being shown to him/herself, becomes the exhibit. One’s own body becomes the origin of spectacle which is seen as light, colour, and rapid changes. Thus, the time and place of the exhibition become dimensions of recording.
Let us remind ourselves of Brook’s definition, according to which it is sufficient to have someone moving in an empty space while being watched for there to be such a thing as a theatrical event. In the project The Eye Hears the Ear Sees the spectacle that we see does not take place on the level of action, but rather on the level of its consequences – on the level of the introduction, manifestation, and the performative power of sound. The “Wall of Light” makes, what perhaps cannot be heard by the ear, visible to the eye. This is the reason why it was necessary to translate sound on the level of visible, since in everyday perception, vision retains its primacy. it is by virtue of being visible that phenomena are given the legitimacy of existence. Is movement just a matter of a change of position in a familiar three dimensional space, or do the characteristic of space itself change in the process of movement?
Text by: Leonida Kovač, MSU Zagreb, 1998.
