Timespace Grid

One can hardly get by without a grid in today’s world. Kant likens language to the system of a grid, without which we are not able to acknowledge anything at all. This structure of symbols mediates our access to the world, and through it we filter our perception of the surrounding universe. The grid also defines the workspace of our computer monitor, whose digital image consists of a system of points arranged in a regular lattice. Renaissance painters used a grid to capture reality in the most accurate way: using it, they transformed the surrounding three-dimensional concrete world into alternative two-dimensional symbolic images.

It is these layers of meaning that Richard Loskot and Marek Štim used for their project in etc. gallery. Having looked for the most appropriate tool to use, they ultimately decided to work with a digital image of the grid and the projection thereof in space. What they found out is that by using long exposure photography in such an environment, one is able to capture a moving object (the figure) in a decomposed state. What emerged was a new volume defined by the grid structure and the time sequence of movements – these spatiotemporal plans are moment that is the most exciting in the whole installation, and it is exactly this that is further developed, elaborated upon, and put to careful analysis by the two artists (the detection of human movement, the flight of a parrot, and the placing and moving of different objects in space).

Photography captures a moment in time and space, and although the four dimensions become abstracted into two, based on our visual experience we can nevertheless assume what happened or what the moment looked like just a second before and an instant after. With long exposure, hidden time is revealed and a new space for our imagination comes into existence.

The installation of Richard Loskot and Marek Štim is therefore primarily an experiment with time, space, and movement, and is a search for the magical moment “in between”; a game played both with reality and with the audience’s perceptions.

Markéta Vinglerová