Trifter 1

A slow pan along a forest that breaks off at a small terrace in the foreground of the picture: Slender conifers stretch upwards over cut and fallen trunks, dead branches and roots, churned soil and dry grass, and parade past one another, structuring the space to impenetrable depths.
The apparent naturalism does not hold up for long. Something is not quite right with this picture, this movement. In the background the trunks begin to stretch out horizontally. Has the image been digitally altered? Have artificial effects been applied to the idyllic scene? Not at all. Instead, the image as a whole turns out to be artificial, its realism the result of elaborate reconstruction.

With a program that he wrote himself, Rainer Gamsjäger re-sorted the (vertical) picture lines of his shots and thus transferred the passing of time into the space of a single image, which is now compiled from the smallest (one pixel wide) snippets of hundreds of originally successive images. The result is not fantastical or abstract constructions; instead, the aim of this special experimental arrangement is - paradoxically - a simulation of the original material. We see a slow pan along a forest. But Gamsjäger´s hybrid images are devious. Foreground and background behave "backwards" in terms of what we know from experience. That which is close is compressed, that which is at a distance stretched, and, most of all, an impossible movement is generated: a drifting apart in opposite directions that turns a lateral movement into motion. The latter, at least, is the product of conditioned perception, the attempt to draw something that is logically impossible into the realistic scheme of things. TRIFTER 1 strains at the synapses. Training for the digital.

(Thomas Korschil)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt


Trifter glides through a strangely frozen forest landscape. Nothing moves there, not even a blade of grass. The dark, sinister forest of the Brothers Grimm, where the fantastic flourishes are served freeze-dried.

(R. G.)