kinema: movement (from the Greek kínêma)
-tope: place (from the Greek topos) This project, part of the Kinematope series, is an in situ installation conceived for the architecture of Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains.
Kinematope [Le Fresnoy] explores the perceptual transformation of an environment through time. The piece uses light and sound to set space in motion. It deconstructs and rearranges the components of the material of cinema to generate a spatial film. The result is an experience based on time that omits all mediation by video camera and that transports observers into a virtual space-time, while preserving the body’s physical links with its environment. The idea behind the work is underpinned by the conceptual origins of Bernard Tschumi’s architecture. The piece organically reactivates a space that has been neglected because it is open and functionless, qualities which in fact bestow character and originality on the building.
For Tschumi, “intercalation is not planned for at the outset, yet it becomes the mainspring of the project… the locus of all the phantasms and of the experiments on space and time.”