Nightvision (1998) . Adam Chodzko
Two-screen synchronised video projection
13 mins 20 seconds
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(NB: This is a low resolution version, as a single screen edit, of a 2 screen video installation, and for reference only.)
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‘Nightvision’ shows two mutually dependent visions produced by a crew that Chodzko assembled of lighting technicians (‘sparks’) who’s work is to facilitate the lighting for clubs and concerts. Chodzko wanted to work with people who normally remain out of visibility, but, from the semi-darkness of ‘back stage’ (or marginal) space, are able to remotely determine the appearance, atmosphere, clarity, depth and colour of the space the viewer is experiencing.
He asked the sparks’ advice as to how to light a wood at night as though it was ‘heaven’. They are ‘experts’ used to solving the practical problem of creating fictions for an audience and are therefore completely unfazed by the quasi-metaphysical nature of the question ‘how should heaven be lit?’
The process of the physical preparation for this illumination is made visible on video by the sickly false ‘light’ – a green phosphorescence – ‘seen’ by an image-intensifier (or nightvision) lens. Their individual interpretations and recommendations for their vision of how ‘heaven’ should be lit manifests itself through a voice-over recorded by Chodzko late at night in the interviewees’ homes, so that their voices sound relaxed, gentle, sleepy, faltering even ‘dreamy’.
Their individual guidance and group rigging process – shown on one screen – both lead towards a moment where we witness, on the screen opposite, the realisation of their activities. It’s a glimpse, a barely formed ‘stab in the dark’ at transcendence after the long build up of a religious ritual. It’s a democratic solution, incorporating elements of their separate counselling turned into a collective whole, but inevitably marking a disparity between the contradictory, idealising nature of their verbal recommendations (some very technical, some more poetic) and the actual visual reality of the illumination that results. It forms a brief peculiar space; ‘heaven’ as an assemblage of different visions; golden, bloody, icy blue and bounded by darkness. The accompanying audio seems relatively silent here due to the cessation of the advisory voices yet it is also somehow ‘full’; the buzzing of electrical feeds and incandescent bulbs giving way to a perception of a more delicate wood atmos; rain pattering on leaves, a distant rumble of thunder.
This scene’s brief manifestation (for 83 seconds) appears to cut out (or ‘overload’) the image-intensifier camera filming the crew, making that space (and its screen within the installation) dark, or ‘blind’. But the new arcadia the crew have prepared becomes quite quickly and steadily terminated through a switching off of the lights. As this screen returns to darkness the original sequence of the crew waiting to prepare the illumination steadily appears (in the loop) on the screen opposite. The disappearance of one space allows the visibility of another. There is a form of reciprocity. For one to exist the other must disappear or be deferred. Darkness appears to be the permanent (and ‘natural’) state here, alleviated only temporarily by imaginations’ multiplicities.
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Nightvision was exhibited in the following exhibitions:
Solo exhibitions of Adam Chodzko’s work:
1999 Ikon gallery in Birmingham,
2004 Carlier Gebauer, Berlin
Group exhibitions:
2000 ‘Dreammachines‘ (curated by Susan Hiller), Dundee Centre for Contemporary Art, touring to Mappin Gallery, Sheffield, Camden Art Centre, London, Glyn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.*
‘Somewhere Near Vada’, Project Art Centre, Dublin.*
‘Artifice,’ Deste Foundation, Athens.*
‘Places in Mind’ (with Stan Douglas and Elizabeth Macgill ), Belfast, Ormeau Baths Gallery,
2001 ‘Bright Paradise’, 1st Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand.*
2001 ‘Night on Earth’, Städtische Ausstellungshalle Am Hawerkamp, Münster*
2002 ‘Life is Beautiful’, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
2005 “Documentary Creations Kunstmuseum Luzern.*
2009 For the Straight Way is Lost, curated by Diana Baldon for Heaven, the Athens Biennale*
* = accompanying publication
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adamchodzko.com/works/nightvision/
