"A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight" Opening: 15.11.2001, 7 p.m. Duration of exhibition: 16.11.2001 – 12.1.2002 "A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight." A poem by James Joyce, written in Zurich in 1917, it was later included in Pomes Pennyeach. Video on DVD. 25 Minutes Color / Sound / Wall Drawing / Photographs / Display System "A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight" is referring to the title of a poem by James Joyce, which in itself can be interpreted allusion, a metaphor of the cinematic projection apparatus. The actors have turned into fleeting characters : remainders becoming visible only in form of reflections and mirror images : screen memories, in every sense of that term. The poem itself, which lends the work its title, refers to cinematic narration and to the concept of the player in the sense of actor, but as well as to the figure of a player who remains absent, a dim reflection in a mirror only. In this way is the fictitious machinery of film described: as a system that also mirrors itself. "Film was frequently on Joyce´s mind, and especially so in 1917, when 'A Memory ...' was composed." It is about the production of image and counter image and how these relate to language and narration, a story retold which through the space and time of its recounting creates a spatial narrative. The project itself is based on the film "The Eyes of Laura Mars" (Irving Kershner 1978, script by John Carpenter). Faye Dunaway is Laura Mars, a successful fashion photographer who is being haunted by visions of violent scenes that turn out to really take place. These visions become starting points of her own photographic work (which in fact is Helmut Newtons´work). Thus the photographer Laura Mars turns from voyeur to medium, thus becomes unvoluntarily a mysterious apparatus of perception fed by disturbing images through telepathic channels. The perspective which is literally imposed on her thus blocking out her own sight turns out to always be the murderer´s point of view which then is being turned into a still frame, the memory becoming part of the photographic oeuvre of Laura Mars: a re-staging of a traumatic moment thus resolving the haunting memory. "The camera which is a portable grave", as Robert Smithson once wrote in "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan". The video is based on a computer animation which re-renders the complete set of architectural spaces and locations which form the backdrop to Laura Mars´ visions. An unconnected series of spaces - an apartment, a stairway, a factory hall, a lobby, an elevator, the penthouse in which Laura Mars is living - turn into one architectural construction through which the virtual camera passes. A digital reconstruction of a new succession of narrative spaces which are again rendered visible by way of the movement of the artificial camera through them . It is not only that within this reconstruction spaces are linked which are in reality as well as in the filmic diegesis disconnected, but there is a notion of the creation of a new narrative as well, a spatial narrative with plot points linked within the architecture itself, and which textual dimensions cover all kinds of areas. The voice over of the video is a kind of interior monologue of a fictitious, multiple character recounting her story. This character which consists only of the narrating voice combines all kinds of sources and memories and characters, possibly referring to Laura Mars as well as to the character of Rahel from Blade Runner, to the character of Nana in Vivre Sa Vie, and it tells about the relation of bodies and architectures, of text and image, of the voice of the (female) author as it is represented by Laura Mars, or the artist herself. A subjective point of view, a brief discourse on fiction, movement, the concept of the gaze and the difference between cameras and eyes. The notion of Antonioni´s neurotic female characters, the women-as-a symptom is being questioned by giving a voice to characters who otherwise do never speak. The disposition and arrangement of virtual architectures and movement through the text creates a framework by which the construction is reflected back into a discourse which is external to the filmic diegesis. Thus the work becomes a contiuation but also a narrative reflexion on issues of the concept of the construction of narration, as well as spaces, whether fictitious or real: memory spaces which at their core are phantasmatic. The video consists of several interpretations of the original computer animation footage : it shows the original animation as well as a reshooting of the very material which has been done by the artist in order to reintroduce a subjective perspective, the one of the female author. Thus various perspectives, point of views, recording and memory techniques are combined, intertwined and played off one another. It is also about the concept of one kind of scopic system imposing on another one, of course the relation between male and female gaze. It reflects on a series of exchange systems of representational mechanisms and transferences of optics which finally through the process of re-filming dissolve within the frame of a single, individual, subjective perspective that returns cinema via digital reconstruction to itself, to the one original gaze of the cinematographic apparatus within which that which has not been recounted can now be told. The internal loops of this system are made accessible by way of the film The Eyes of Laura Mars, which in itself represents a very specific Eighties trope within the Hollywood System, a filmic strategy based on this kind of subjectivity that does not belong to the Sixties anymore nor to a f.e. Godardian position but which has reintroduced something new: the blending of genres, the use of video technique, the blurring of vision and gender as well. "The Eyes of Laura Mars" gives a number of examples relating to the concept of the construction of a female perspective set in relation to a camera perspective. Laura´s gaze becomes the camera in those very moments in which she herself turns into victim: her visions reflect that what a stranger sees, by which her own ability to perceive is obliterated. She is not only a victim but has to look at herself becoming a victim (through the eyes of the pursuer). She, via a scopic transference, becomes one with the other and thus enters a weird kind of identity loop. The strategy which is being applied in "A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight" consists of a symptomatic rereading of architectural and narrative materials derived from various sources, as it were, and how these are coded within the realm of a collective memory. The concept of gaze is, via architectural projection, being transported into the area of language. The visuals of the recounted narration are ´amplified´ by a soundtrack recording the voice of a character between Laura Mars, the actress and the artist herself who, by refilming the digital material introduces a new subjective to the story, their layers of tales which structure the spaces that thus open up. In his essay "Spatial Narratives" the author Mark Rakatansky defines the term of "spatial narrative":'(...) narratives of exposing and reworking certain repressed narratives within the field of discourses and economies already at work in architecture. This work renders visible a system which allows for detecting structures within filmic and narrative systems, and which puts these via architectural displays in a relation to fictitious techniques of the gaze and its movement through space. A story unfolding sequentially is thus transferred into architecture, and by way of changing forms of representation the story itself changes, orientating along a timeline that is also demarcating a gaze referring to stories untold or repressed.