Information
Uršula Berlot >
»BODYSCOPE«, 2012
Co-Workers & Funding:
Scanner – Robin Rimbaud (sound)Altos, KIBLA Multimedia Center Maribor, Ministry of Culture RS
Video projection (2,50′), digital print on aluminum
dim: 150 x 200 cm
Technology
Installation Requirements / Space
video projectionMethod
Radiology, digital print on aluminium support
Descriptions & Essays
Uršula Berlot 20-04-2020
The repeated kaleidoscopic video was created on the basis of radiological image of a spine and projected back over the original radiological image printed on an aluminum support. Such projection creates layering, a kind of of spatial superposition into repetitive hypnotic pattern.
The image in motion is periodically decomposed and reassembled into a coherent original image.
'A great deal of Uršula Berlot’s opus is marked by the exploration of intersections between science – mostly medicine, and art. Her works are often based on a recontextualization of visual results from medical diagnostic techniques, which are torn out of the medical context and often computer processed and transferred into the context of art. In her works, the author establishes a particular poetics, which spans across a highly estheticized technologism, stressed by an often monochromic impression and a typical tendency towards orderly symmetry, and a transparent, nearly ephemeral character of the works, whose materiality is often soothed by the play of light. Images of the body and the fragility of their incarnation in the gallery are an allusion to some of the elementary dichotomies that have decisively marked the history of art – the visual and the non-visual, the material and the spiritual, the transient and the eternal. But a new esthetic value and a connotation of transience are not the only things brought about by the change of context – it serves also to re- question the meaning of medical imagery in contemporary society.
Bodyscope is a spatial installation produced in a time when the technological eye of advanced display technologies in medicine has almost entirely replaced the direct sensual perception. Ever since the renaissance, looking inside the body has been a medical imperative – but to see means to understand, and understanding is seemingly only a step away from mastering and random design. The ideal of the western medicine took the form of a transparent, entirely cognitive body that cannot hide anything from the panoptic clinical eye. The tendency to comprehend and master human physiology is of course understandable and, in the context of isolated medical research, benign.' – Žiga Dobnikar, Bodyscope, 2012 (excerpt)
Uršula Berlot: BODYSCOPE, 20-04-2020, in: Archive of Digital Art The repeated kaleidoscopic video was created on the basis of radiological image of a spine and projected back over the original radiological image printed on an aluminum support. Such projection creates layering, a kind of of spatial superposition into repetitive hypnotic pattern.
The image in motion is periodically decomposed and reassembled into a coherent original image.
'A great deal of Uršula Berlot’s opus is marked by the exploration of intersections between science – mostly medicine, and art. Her works are often based on a recontextualization of visual results from medical diagnostic techniques, which are torn out of the medical context and often computer processed and transferred into the context of art. In her works, the author establishes a particular poetics, which spans across a highly estheticized technologism, stressed by an often monochromic impression and a typical tendency towards orderly symmetry, and a transparent, nearly ephemeral character of the works, whose materiality is often soothed by the play of light. Images of the body and the fragility of their incarnation in the gallery are an allusion to some of the elementary dichotomies that have decisively marked the history of art – the visual and the non-visual, the material and the spiritual, the transient and the eternal. But a new esthetic value and a connotation of transience are not the only things brought about by the change of context – it serves also to re- question the meaning of medical imagery in contemporary society.
Bodyscope is a spatial installation produced in a time when the technological eye of advanced display technologies in medicine has almost entirely replaced the direct sensual perception. Ever since the renaissance, looking inside the body has been a medical imperative – but to see means to understand, and understanding is seemingly only a step away from mastering and random design. The ideal of the western medicine took the form of a transparent, entirely cognitive body that cannot hide anything from the panoptic clinical eye. The tendency to comprehend and master human physiology is of course understandable and, in the context of isolated medical research, benign.' – Žiga Dobnikar, Bodyscope, 2012 (excerpt)
Literature
Nagy, Vasja. »Uršula Berlot: Transparentno telo (Vanitas)/Transparent Body (Vanitas), Gallery Domžale, 7th – 23th of March 2013.« Domžale: Kulturni dom Franca Bernika (2013).
Dobnikar, Žiga. »Bodyscope.« Kibla – multimedia center, Maribor, Slovenia. (2012).
Exhibitions & Events