Strobogramm

A young woman — played by the artist herself — stands in a room and repeatedly flicks a normal light switch. This modest long shot of an unexceptional scene provides Flora Watzal with the raw material for a study of time and space which is as precisely thought through as it is entertaining.
She has divided the picture of her video into a regular grid. At the beginning the spectator is shown nothing more than blackness, and the game begins when the ceiling lamp is switched on. After that one section of the picture after another lights up and then goes dark again, from left to right and from top to bottom.
The contents of the individual fields are time-delayed, with an eight-frame difference between adjacent rectangles. The extreme contrasts in brightness enable the spectator to follow the steady serial and sequential movement of the individual fragments across the picture, in which the fields are constantly overwritten. The shifts of light and dark portions within the composition are the simple result of the varying intervals between the artist switching the ceiling lamp on and then switching it off.
On the soundtrack the soft clicking of the switch takes place and multiplies because of the numerous superimpositions of sound, becoming a constantly modulating fabric that climaxes in loud, rhythmic clattering.
The arrangement of the segments, which are “written onto” from left to right and top to bottom, corresponds with the conventions of Latin script on the one hand, and at the same time makes a reference to the medium of video on the other. The line-by-line setup of video images, comprising tiny pixels, happens so quickly that the naked eye perceives continuous movement. One could say that Watzal reproduces this effect, though making it slower and on a larger scale, as a result of which it becomes a visual sensation in this video with the revealing title Strobogramm.
And everything ends as it began: The partial “illuminations” are inevitably followed by darkness.
(Norbert Pfaffenbichler)