Flickering images in a frantic soundstorm. A beautiful woman’s face goes wild on four oversized projections. This is the stunning installation MODELL 5, one of the pioneering achievements in media art from the 1990s by Kurt Hentschläger and Ulf Langheinrich (Granular Synthesis). The question then was: What is the relationship between humans and their electronic image, those watching it, and space? Akemi Takeya, the performer for the recordings or electronically processed “mirror images”, undergoes the dissolution of her physical cohesion. MODELL 5 shows how audiovisual technologies can recompose an image: it is divided into layers that transpose into each other, moving in different directions; the face vibrates horizontally and is caught in a vertical excess of rotation that generates a screaming monster.
