Real crime, 2004. Video installation, 13 min 44 sec. Multi-channel projection

 

The title for the video production has been derived from Jean Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime (1996) and plays with his idea that the world as we experience it reveals itself through appearances. If not for appearances, the world would represent the perfect crime (in other words, disappeared without a trace).The computer-generated video production was manipulated from imagery of twigs, dry bushes and bare trees that was filmed in the Lowveld, Mpumalanga. The Renaissance cosmological colour idiom range of blue, green, red and brown-grey were utilised; these colours were digitally shifted to a more artificial colour idiom so that the red for instance became a neon pink and the blue an intense neon blue. This was a deliberate conceptual choice in order to play with the idea of artificially constructed worlds.The work is in three parts and refers to the four cosmologicalelements as encountered in Greek thought: Part 1 signifies fire and connecting cyberworlds; Part 2 refers to water and the fluidity of constructed worlds; and Part 3 refers to earth, materiality and artifice. There is reference to the fourth element, air, via the suggestion of hyperspace and virtuality as the connecting aspect.

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Award: Finalist at Brett Kebble Awards, 2004