scrape | artwork and documentation | seoul square media canvas | robert seidel | 2011
Seoul seems to be a glowing, crystal-like urban canyon, each chasm illuminated and infinitely reflected in flat facets of glass. The film shows abstract formations that are scraped and cut out of the missing darkness of the city. They reveal a light volume overcoming the flatness of the façade by breaking into the space from the front or dissolving it from behind.
In its slowly evolving, almost biological structures the work is reminiscent of deep-sea creatures. These complex life forms try to attract their prey with emission of light, so-called bioluminescence. In this case the “prey” is the potential audience, who nearly lose sight of the nearby billboards and city lights as they follow a hypnotic contrast to the pulsating city life of Seoul.
scrape uses a colour palette of warm shades of blue, red and green which originate from the defined raster of neutral light sources of the media canvas. The moving afterimages painted in pure light extend over the orthogonal framework of the façade, providing a view into a stream of forms and colours. Voluminous black spaces divide and separate the scene into ever-changing ambiguous sculptural formations. With their constant process of growth and decay into darkness they seem to exist in the flat surface and the spatial depth at the same time.
Overall the film maps the fluid dynamics of the inner forces of an organic structure, recapturing and quieting a world agitated by technology.
Video: Robert Seidel
Sound: Rafał Stachowiak
Commissioned by Goethe-Institute Seoul and Gana Art Center
Exhibition German Media Art on Seoul Square Media Canvas
Original Dimension: 99 x 79m
5th April to 27th September 2011
Seoul, South Korea
Robert Seidel
