Submarine Channel
It must be said, every year TodaysArt Festival brings something really stunning. For example, at the 2006 edition we witnessed a great performance by Structet that took Wagner’s ideas for a Gesamtkunstwerk to the next level with a piece called Building Music in which the huge atrium of The Hague’s city hall was overflowing with strange sounds and fantastic images. In 2007 we saw some great stuff from avant-garde collectives like United Visual Artists and Pfadfinderei. This year one of the highlights was outside the above mentioned city hall. The exterior of this great, snow white building (designed by famous American architect Richard Meier) became the canvas for Pablo Valbuena. This Spanisch artist is definitely worth a closer look.
With his laser-sharp projections he controls buildings, giving them extra volume where there is in fact nothing. It’s difficult to explain and if you read the info on his website it’s even more complex: “This project is focused on the temporary quality of space, investigating space-time not only as a three dimensional environment, but as space in transformation. For this purpose two layers are produced that explore different aspects of the space-time reality. On the one hand the physical layer, which controls the real space and shapes the volumetric base that serves as support for the next level. The second level is a virtual projected layer that allows controlling the transformation and sequentiality of space-time. The blending of both levels gives the impression of physical geometry suitable of being transformed. The overlapping produces a three-dimensional space augmented by a transformable layer suitable to be controlled, resulting in the capacity through the installation of altering multiple dimensions of space-time.”
Capito? Check out this short clip on YouTube or visit Valbuena’s website and you know what we are talking about.
