Ran Slavin
World 5, Version 2, 2016
Installation, mixed media
Courtesy of the artist
Ran Slavin's video installation at the Haifa Museum of Art (the work's first version was shown at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year) is comprised of a number of video locations and electronic, digital, sound, and light objects. They combine to form a fragmented picture occurring intensively, simultaneously, and repetitively, in a number of locations. The project reflects a technologically, culturally, ethically, and aesthetically complex portrait of the present with respect to time, place, and space. Slavin works with layered digital 3-D animation, reflecting on the meaning of our disconnection from natural time. He proposes a technological space and time as a multisensory reflection of the virtual-digital age.
The project's title echoes the common categorization of the world's countries into "first," "second," and "third world," according to parameters such as regime, economy, and technological progress. World 5, Version 2 is a virtual world no longer dependent on representational or photographic strategies. In it, time deviates from the natural order and is no longer dependent on the orbits of the sun and Earth, which determine our 24 hours per day and divide these hours into light and dark. This world is a binary, uninterrupted one, multi-screen, fragmented, electricity-dependent, and characterized by technological excess and information. It is spread out in arrays of screens, sound and light objects creating a multi-screen heterotopic arrangement, winding nets, exposed electrical sockets, computerized graphics, light bulbs and electronic units attached to each other provisionally, with office paper clips.
World 5, Version 2 proposes contemplating a flickering, ever-changing space with awe and enchantment. Three-dimensional images of mechanical bodies and ancient landscapes interspersed with multi-layered digital Pop art are placed in landscapes recalling science fiction and virtual aesthetics. This world offers different parallel possibilities, for which there is no structured, "proper" course of viewing or understanding. It is a simultaneous, hybrid utopian world, characterized by movement between the physical and the digital with no beginning, middle, or end, between ambient electronic music and light sculptures.
Ran Slavin was born in Jerusalem, 1967; lives and works in Tel Aviv.