Lívia Páldi
Partial View
The Dream of Reason : Vadim Fiškin

I.

In Greek mythology according to one legend it was Prometheus who created mankind out of clay and water and when Zeus mistreated man, he not just stole fire from the gods and gave it to man but taught him many useful arts and sciences.

To recall this mythological moment Robert Wilson’s recent project Immaginando Prometeo /“Imagining Prometheus” in Milan[1] gave space to different projects and artists of very diverse cultural horizons to meditate about light. Apart from the main hall and the works within a specifically built/designed “Gesamtkunstwerk” enviroment Vadim Fiškin’s light project A Speedy Day created a dreamlike passage.[2] A white room with a screen behind a window-like cut at its rear and a clock running and showing the accelerated time on its electronic display panel on the left. The light was changing rapidly over the window’s white blank field so was the ambience by the disguised light system built around the ceiling of the room. Following the rhythm of the clock days and nights were passing in front of our eyes. The speed, that is calculated by formula, was selected as one of the several different options: 24 hours were compressed in 12 minutes that “would be the “day” of the “Earth clock”, if we were on a rocket moving out of the Earth with the speed  of 299,782 km/sec, (just 10km/sec  less  than light speed).”[3]

Silently staring at an illuminated blank screen we watched the light flickering between a still image that requires quiet contemplation and the moving image which diverts attention. When Yves Klein in 1961 “staged”  Le Vide in Krefeld he wanted the spectator not to see but perceive colour entering the “zone of immaterial”, the artistic sensibility of “the real blue.” There the effect of light in the room where not only the walls but also the ceiling and the floor was painted white “seemed to make energy visible.”[4] and function as one unit with space and time. Vadim Fiškin plays with the relativity of our perception of time when alteres the human created units of measurements: seconds, minutes, hours, and days. The space of A Speedy Day becomes an isolation cell where we are to lose our “normal” sense of time. One might project some inner films of personal memories and imagination on the “empty” screen or wander away to relieve the suspence created by the clock’s infinite reverse countdown, the speeded up view of days and nights fading away.

As speed creates emptiness A Speedy Day exists through the paradoxical tension between speeding up and stillness, the logic (as succession of exact units) of time and the actual perception, the personal experience of duration in which it becomes fluid and uncontrollable. Similarly to the Movie Theatre series of Hiroshi Sugimoto where the bright white screen – “produced” with long exposures lasting as long as the photographed sequence of the entire film – emerges empty and “thus qualifies as either the everything of all possible images or else their nothingness as vehicles of illusion” and the light ”represents an invisible film enshrined in a visible interior.”[5]

A Speedy Day eases the viewers from reality to illusion and back enveloping them in a quasi-cinematic world of pure perception but Vadim Fiškin’s attitude towards pleasure closely connected with diverse hypotheses of scientists from the experiements of Albert Abraham Michelson and Edward Williams Morley [6], the analysis of George Francis FitzGerald and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz[7] to Albert Einstein’s  theory of Special Relativity – a theory of time and space, proposed that distance and time are not absolute – and a closely related phenomenon, the so-called clock or twin paradox, predicted by Special Relativity.[8]  A Speedy Day combines encyclopaedic knowledge and visionary imagination with poetry thus creates a “dream machine” and ambiance but if one had stepped close to the “window” the machinery behind the spectacle, the mechanisms of the cinematic/theatrical experience revealed. The psychological and emotional reactions of the viewer, his affection as well as the transparency of the spectacle play significant roles.

II.

In Invisible Cities,Italo Calvino’s a surreal fantasy, Marco Polo invents dream-cities to amuse Kubla Khan whose labyrinthine empire becomes a metaphor of the universe itself. For Polo as a storyteller “with cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”[9]

Vadim Fiškin’s work open to diverse interpretations communicates the relations between science, personal experience, desire and imagination, metaphysics and pragmatism, artificial and real and finds subtle linkage that arouses the viewers’ curiosity, yet leaves them guessing as to its ultimate. Forcing our imagination to be active the almost mystical aura of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places connects to a “guidebook of the make-believe" of the same name by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi[10] that contains more than 1200 imaginary places from literary works ranging from Homer's Aiaia to J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Two distorted voices (played from a CD-rom via two adjusted speakers) recite, like some strange lullabies, names of places and countries. The frequency waves they produce are shown on a flat screen next to the dreamlike stereographic image of a performance project  "Die Traumdeutung" with a floating hot air ballon in the Postojna caves. Employing the objects’ and ideas’ variety of form an illusion is created as if there was a coherent system underlying the discords of longing.

Virilio very much stressing Einstein’s role denotes that the metaphysical dimension originates from the current technological innovation and developments. Technology inevitably raises metaphysical questions preventing us from differentiating between materialists and spiritualists.[11] As we live increasingly telematic lives, where 'real' feelings, behaviours and perception are triggered through abstracted involvements with artificial structures, and illusions the definition and appearances of 'artificial' are as well in question. Also as creators of artificial things and being ourselves artificial shapers of our lives we play a strategic position in the shaping dynamic of the artificial. In Vadim Fiškin’s works the creative imagination and the artificial products are closely related to dreams and particularly to the way we consciously process them, to our myths. Both our dreams and our rationality are at the origin of artificiality.

The recently exhibited Molecule (Marbles)[12] is one of the lagre size twin-series of stereo images[13], deceive the eye by playing with the pictorial illusion of the artificially (and home-made) built ’real’. Fiškin uses domestic ready-mades, colour chewing gum balls, straws and knot of wires, to build up structures that remind us on high-tech scientific pesentations. Within the frame we perceive not a single image but the illusion of a sequence of relations that gets animated by our individual moves and changed positions. Illusion serves to tip the spectator out of his routine. In Fiškin’s “conditional” pieces the game also takes two and one either steps in or might jealeously watch others taking the initiative and missing out on the show. The spectacularity of Firework or Snow_Show (2000) would remain hidden unless the visitor adressed in person felt encouraged enough to help the small surprise to come through. >From the moment the spectator accepts the invitation and presses a button stating his or her name behind the pulpit he is part of as well as the collaborator in making the illusion work. When the computer-generated voice announces a personalized dedication a special light switches on and either a small firework appears or the dedicated is showered on with artificial snow and could enjoy some Hawaian guitar music.

Dismantling conventional notions of narrativity and communication Fiškin also explores the limits of language and the manner in which the employment of non-solid matter such as water, light and sound has the power to convey meanings that transcend normal linguistic conventions. Similarly to Ognegraf, that is a translator of data originating from various sources into fire language, Kaplegraf is a device, which can translate data into ”water drops” language. In the Valencia installation[14] Kaplegraf (techet reka Volga) 30 "drop devices" were following a cult song about the river Volga. With Kaplegraf (drops of reason)[15] Fiškin invited the viewer to make the device ”communicate” via a personal computer. Kaplegraf learns to solve the given mathematical operation (adding up) and tells the result in its computer generated voice followed by the demanded number of drops falling into transparent bowls. The intensified sound of the drops dominate the exhibition space from time to time arousing tension between the “romantic” atmosphere of the shower of water drops and the programmed character of the spectacle triggered by visitors. 

Vadim Fiškin’s constructions in a way contiguous with the holistic and inter-disciplinary outlook of Friedrich Kiesler[16] who with his Vision Machine wanted to demonstrate “that neither light, nor eye, nor brain, alone or in association, can see. But rather, we see only through the total coordination of human experiences; and even then, it is our own conceived image, and not really the actual object which we perceive. We learn, therefore, that we see by creative ability and not by mechanical reproduction.”[17]