Zangemeister, W. H.: "Ad Gabriele Leidloff: Video of a Moving Visual Object",

in: U. Frohne (ed.), video cult/ures. multimediale Installationen der 90er Jahre, DuMont, Köln 1999

Ad Gabriele Leidloff: Video of a Moving Visual Object

The flood of images we are so used to is so overwhelming that often only stills, "situative process of ‘frozen‘ movements" may help us to recover these superfluos imagery. How does the brain deal with all this visual hyperinformation? One way of course is not to look!

But if we view anything or all of this flood of images, then we may stop to follow these external pictures with our eyes, i.e. we may stop to apply our continuously generated internal models of our surrounding world for their repetitiveness and perseverance lacking real visual information. In this case the ever rapidly changing pictures of low to zero information do not "guide" our eyes and brain any more, as so many of us prefer to believe.

This is also the point where visual communication - the self and the picture, i.e. the selves of viewer and artist meeting through the picture, - comes to a stand-still. Here even death as a metaphor may be evoked as the visual point of zero contact of the non-moving eye (brain) focusing on the internal model of what the viewer‘s mind is ready to see.

Lady Di: The circular pictures as well as the mystical repetition of the bells in Gabriele Leidloff‘s video work - a staged scenery of the ‘round-the-clock worldwide reporting done on Lady Di‘s funeral, filmed from television, recopied and alienated -demonstrate nicely this turning point of visual imagery.

I.e., stand still - focusing onto the viewer‘s internal model - setting the "mystic drama" to zero. This then permits a new, more intrinsic communication with the underlying texture and content of the video pictures.

The conversion of Lady Di‘s dead body into an empty and fuzzy "Moving Visual Object", as shown in this piece of video work, which is interpreted by the viewer as laying in the coffin - even so nothing may have been in there as nobody can be sure of this while watching the repeating video replay - gives the whole idea of the ambiguous mystification that expands between real belief into the princess‘ tragedy and the virtual sight of a mystified object and former subject that is being presented in complete audio-visual emptiness.

Wolfgang H. Zangemeister, Professor of Neurology, 1998