BED

‘Bed’ is an interactive installation, consisting of a continuous projection of an empty bedroom projected on the wall of a house or a building. The scale is almost 1:1 with respect to real life size, creating the illusion as if one is actually looking through a window in the wall of a house. When a sensor is triggered by the movement of a person or a vehicle passing by (deliberate or accidental), an unexpected and uncanny poetic transformation takes place, only briefly for the viewer to discern. A deer suddenly jumps on the bed in this room and dreamily stares at the viewer, only to disappear immediately. Adding a dimensional shift to the environment, the installation operates as an intervention within the public space as an ephemeral gesture crossing the boundaries of reality and fiction, private and public sphere, inside and outside. In our contemporary cityscapes teeming with commercialized and privatized messages, the work is blurring intimate space and blunt billboard ads, mixing the commercial space with personal poetics within the fabric of the city. The installation creates an interactive way of zapping through reality by juxtaposing and deliberately confusing reality with a memory of reality. Its poetics intervene unexpectedly, and they are created - or at least triggered - by the same person that is walking past and looking at these images. The viewer is zapped into an intimate, forbidden non-existing space, which becomes suddenly palpably real. Set in a real environment, the displacement of the image is put to front. The culture of reality television has accustomed us to privileged ‘bedroom images’, images that penetrate the private lives of people and increase our voyeuristic needs by blunt commercial ads dictating our desires. The viewer is privileged into other people’s homes, but as a direct consequence also deterred from his own privacy. Generating an unanticipated disruption in the viewer’s perception of the ordinary urban context surrounding him, when the installation is triggered a permeating metaphorical shift takes places. The static image unexpectedly transforms into an uncanny scene, revealing itself as an ambiguous ‘billboard’, endowed with new significance in an unusual context. The installation acts as a metaphorical remote control unconsciously activated by the viewer passing by, creating a poetic portal in an ordinary urban context, disconnecting the viewer from trivial decoding of reality and provoking a dynamic thought process. The viewer’s perception is suddenly restructured as the work reverses notions of inside and outside, reality and fantasy and shifts artistic and advertising imagery. In this regard, the artist makes an artistic reference to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s billboard work ‘Untitled’ (1992), a black-and white photograph of a double bed, which was displayed in twenty-four billboards throughout New York. Whereas commercial billboards are designed to demand consumer attention in an unambiguous attempt of mind controlling perception, the art work appearing in the format of a billboard in public space encourages the viewer to open-mindedly re-evaluate his relationship to the urban landscape and daily reality around him.