marta beauchamp
works texts artistic research contact

blindspot
(2019)

kinetic installation

Digital print on paper (50 × 70 cm), fabric, belt, wood, mechanical components, DC gearhead motor, sound sensor, Arduino Uno, loudspeaker, looped environmental sound recording (7’ 2’’)
Size: c.a. 3 × 3 × 5 m

Photo in poster © Felix Bernhard,
else Marta Beauchamp


In a glass cabin on top of a roof, mobile curtains obscure the field of view, variably disclosing an ever-changing mosaic landscape; they are set in motion by a custom-built system that responds to the use of the elevator in the building. Despite the interference of the curtains, by memorising snapshots of smaller portions of the landscape, viewers can produce their own image of wholeness. A photograph of the room augmented by a model staircase that connects the floor to the ceiling of the cabin is plastered to a wall in the back of the cabin; it presents the unfeasible possibility to walk to a further level, from which a better view of the landscape could be expected.
Despite it being the highest spot of the building, the glass cabin fails to offer an absolute perspective over its surroundings and hence poses constrains. Any attempt to look deeply into the micro and macro infinity of the universe is equally constrained by the instruments used to perform observations; the limitations of these instruments challenge the observer with a loss of control over the observed.