Are you scared yet?

Art review for the unfaint

Stuck between two glass walls, in the isolation of a giant aquarium a predatory flower with four rectangular petals rests unassumingly. It’s unlike a Venus flytrap; mere presence will not trigger an attack. She is more like a wolf: her reflexes are awakened only when she senses movement of her future victim.

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Phenotype and Ontogeny

She posits us as offering, and by behaving as pure devices we become her self-fulfilling prophecies, and are soon deafened by a roar of a sine-wave and flooded by moving patterns of light and shadows — all constantly feeding back to themselves in circles of seemingly endless loops of creation. She’s a murderous perpetuum mobile, a slave to and stretching its own restrictions of its very operation, the cruel laws of physics.

Nika Schmitt, born in Luxembourg and now residing in Rotterdam, does sound installations. This one, the one in Rotondes’ cube, is a mobile one operated mostly by itself, and set off by the viewer stepping into the visual field of a motion sensor.

Minimalist Luxembourgish lithography

The sensor initiates two intertwined feedback loops — one of sound and one of light — the latter feeding off of the former, and both of themselves, in the two primary modalities of human communication.

Sound — The first loop is sonic. The direct response to our movement is a sound wave emitted from an upwards pointed speaker. The sound is picked up by a microphone suspended above the speaker, from a lever capable of horizontal rotation. The picked up sound is then fed back to the speaker, and as the microphone senses that sound up as well, we get feedback loop #1.

Light — The second loop is optical. The pendulum the microphone is attached to ends in a light bulb. The bulb is powered by electricity generated by the sonic signal of loop #1. Four solar panels placed around the speaker like petals of a giant flower swallow the light of the bulb and start off an engine spinning the lever, and with it the pivot of the pendulum ending in the microphone and the bulb. This is loop #2.

Minimalisticer Luxembourgish lithography

Short: Changes in the frequency of sound change the frequency of light, and thus the movement of the aided Foucault’s pendulum. The flower comes to life in the noise of its vocal pistil, devouring all light of its own making, its petals reflecting back the inevitably absorbed energy into itself.

Death and Decay

CUBE. It’s a hollow, even-sided body, two of its vertical square walls made of transparent glass. It is not in a gallery but a bar, so visits are at times unprompted, reception of art thus spilling onto factuality. Accidentally, screams of the predator trapped within also spill into open space, transcending the walls of the box; and so does the untrapped light of all surrounding movement. CUBE is a portal, a static device of two-way dynamics, a sneak preview into the in- and outside of our perceived boundaries.

Tree with a fish as roots

Almost Bosch, but not quite

The volume for a while intensifies with every flicker of the spinning light, slowly but surely spearing through our eardrums, aiming to grab our threshold of pain, before gravity — both its friend and foe — kills it in a slow fade.

The pull of our globe, responsible for the regularity of the bulb’s curve in its swing and the circular feed of energy, the secondary instigator of our entrapment in the chant of the cube is gradually fulfilling its nature and saving us from ourselves. Our motion instigated our intended demise, a motion stemming from our own will to devour whatever the cube had to offer. We activated the trap of the petals, gravity favoured the kill for a moment, then it started working for us, to save our souls.

Standing motionless in the cacophony of the primitive wave we survive, accomplishing our mission, claiming victo-ry over simple nature, by sheer luck served by one of the basic motors of said nature. Art dies in front of our eyes and ears, only to be respawned in the following act of either deliberate or accidental consumption. Us and the flower, we appoint each other in reciprocity; the absence of one is the thriving of the other.

In complementarity activated by will, bottom-up forces collaborate with the top-down autocracy of humanity. Accidentally, for the time of consumption, we claim the win.

Busy

The essay is a reflection on Nika Schmitt’s installation “Sweet Zenith,” observable in Rotondes, until 29th January 2023. Entrance is free.

by Zoltan Tajti