SHAN SHUI 地平线
(Rotterdam / Veerlaan 13, Katendrecht, Fenixloods 1 – first floor)
Media artist Geert Mul (1965, the Netherlands) studies the visual grammar that allows images to be recombined in video and interactive installations. Mul’s leitmotiv is the ordering of information and the (problematic) relationship between new and already existing data. The artist is building databases and developing hardware and software to generate new visual meanings and establish connections. For his interactive installation Shan Shui (Chinese landscape painting and poetry) Mul collected 500 Chinese Shan Shui landscape paintings in a database. By means of self-developed software images are sent to the projector and the viewer can steer the images by changing the position of the projection. This transforms the typically Chinese landscapes and gives rise to a fluid relationship between image, landscape and viewer. The history of landscape painting, the artists argues, includes a history of cultural perception of the landscape, a view that is also shared by philosopher Tom Lemaire (cf. essay by Frits Gierstberg). Mul visualizes the cultural relation by centering on the ‘exotic’ landscape. Images depicting the ‘East’ serve as points of reflection for the ‘West’ and vice versa. An earlier interactive installation by Mul is HORIZONS and features the Western landscape.