Magdalena Pederin’s latest work features an installation of endlessly multiplying signs organised in a rhythmically blinking repetition of audio visual space, projected from a DVD. The viewer is literally drenched in this typographic bath.
Magdalena Pederin’s enigmatic installation places the viewer in an aesthetic electronic continuum of ever changing numbers and letters. The words, fragmented into a number of basic elements, are programmed to sporadically, but sequentially, combine into new words thus creating patterns of new significations.
Using the 16 letters of the artist’s name, the ASCI computer language is the device activated to create thousands of combinations – anagrams. This endless reiteration of sound and image, the letter puzzle of anagrammatic combinations has been arrested here, stopped as if by pressing the ‘still’ button, by placing three wooden cubes in the space.They contain three anagrams: engine drama pedal, a gender denial map and a rapid name legend. The cubes [boxes] house a system of glass panes and mirrors with letters and numbers fixed on them – looking into these boxes is like looking into a modern day bottomless well. ‘Frozen’, but infinite.
After deciphering the meaning of the letters, the ‘images’ in the boxes and the content of the DVD, we realise that the female mechanical voice is in fact enunciating the thousands of anagrams which are visually displayed, too. This is an infinite loop on several levels.
From 1915 to the late 60′s, Marcel Duchamp was looking for ways of breaking with the surface of a tailored canvas, as dictated by the canons of painting. First he experimented with making applications on window panes, then by installing windows and doors he pointed to the irresolvable barrier of the infinite – as, paradoxically, they offer no way out – beyond cognition lies a world governed by different physical, temporal and spatial rules.
The author marks the border between here and there with a view through the looking glass and into the depth. The depth is nothing other than an anagram with thousands of reflections in the mirror, refracting letters and numbers in a various combinations – like the echo of a subject caught in an endlessly repeating chain of signification.
Her work evolves in world of consistently urban connotations of electronic arts, within the context of the international electronic art scene. This scene developed from pioneering new media inventions to complex handlings as the means themselves presented a complete novelty. Today electronics are part of our everyday lives, so her work could be defined as generic, coming, as it does, from the experiences of our immediate surroundings; from the hardware of the DVD, to the software of the typeface, all these are recognisable tools and signifiers of a certain age, means we use to complete this here end, means we use to communicate with, means we consume on a daily basis.
But Magdalena Pederin, using these same means reaches different, magical, but still clear ends. The chaotic pollution of technology is here translated into a personal artistic language by a process of reduction and selection gaining maximum effect. Magdalena Pederin has created a kind of ‘less is more’, lodged in the infinite. The contemporary aesthetic uniqueness of the work the name is an anagram results in a simple installation of electronica with a surprisingly poetic visual and sound effect.
Text by: Aleksandra Kostić | curator of kibela art space
The installation was produced by kid kibla and was first exhibited in kibela at the group exhibition ‘Cold Sophisticated’ [with Mirjana Rukavina, Helmut Scheffer and Walter Kratner], from the 24th of May to the 8th of June 2002.
