SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22ND

Emerging Arts Presents

LOVE, ART&WAR

A Multimedia Art Extravaganza Showcasing the work of Over 40 NYC Artists.

including Christian de Lutz with the digital projection of the Meta Content series


go to Emerging Arts website



text on my digital projection in the exhibition:


meta content- source code images

The series meta content, 2001-3 began with a series of black and white
photographs I took in Macedonia during the 1990s.

In 2001 I was working with the idea of conceptual trompe l'oeil images -
manipulating photographs to make them appear as paintings, video stills,
etc.

In late 2001 I began experimenting with the idea of making 'faux-night vision'
images which imitated military surveillance technology. At about the same
time I became acquainted with a text
by the new media sholar Denisa Kera. The text was part of a larger projects
by scholars at the Charles University in Prague in cooperation with the
Open Society fund researching myths and archetypes and Balkan nationalism.

The text in question was part of a larger analysis of nationalist websites.
The text on Macedonia posited a unique paradigm for Macedonian sites.
Instead of concentraing on Macedonian myths these websites seemed obsessed
by the myths of their neighbors- what Ms. Kera referred to as 'mythophobia'.

For me this idea of 'mythophobia' and fear of ones neighbors fit well with
the paranoic images I was creating. Furthermore it was very much the opposite
of the grand myths found in thos eneighboring countries- a kind of negative
(like a photographic negative) of 'Greater Serbia' or the Greek 'Megala
Idea'.

I have incorporated the source code from Denisa Kera's original site (http://balkan2001.webpark.cz)
into the images, which are all taken in Skopje. To further the 'negative
effect' I have used images that point to the minority and non-Macedonian
(Slav) population (Albanian, Roma, Turkish).

more on the META CONTENT series on my May 7 2002 blog entry