ALTERATION 109

Descriptive geometry for alien architecture: in her video ALTERATION 109, the software and net artist LIA carries out the metastasis of graphic objects; to begin with, in silvery black-and-white. In doing so, a highly-defined play of flat black, white, and gray forms shifting in and over another takes shape; a complex dance of fault lines, grids, peaks, and edges. The stuff quivers and pulsates, as though a mechanical heart were thumping within it enabling all of the mutations: the virtual design of this minimal universe is fundamentally unstable; reverting, transforming, altering, rebuilding is its basic program.
In gentle flip-flop effects and turning movements, the happenings nearly imperceptibly crossfade from the vertical to the horizontal; the illusion of spatial depth arises, the suggestion of proximity and distance, of focused and blurred zones. The nervous sounds from the computer conjure up a type of incomprehensible drama, a suspense that remains abstract: the sound design of LIA´s collaborators @C seems to comment on the visual course of events in a strictly coded language, to accompany it with the whispers of the hard drive and circuitry. First in the final third, as analogue percussion seeps into the soundtrack, discrete colors join in—blazing hues of orange, which soon play into blood red. In the finale, the colors are abruptly withdrawn again, movement dies down; the image gives birth to a synthetic sky in which a few ominous stars shine: News from a distant planetary system.
(Stefan Grissemann)
translation: Lisa Rosenblatt