NAVIGATOR
Normally a navigational device or navigator serves to provide orientation in unfamiliar territory, to establish paths in the middle of nowhere by means of geometric aids. But what happens when space and its record, region and map, merge and begin to intertwine?
In NAVIGATOR Björn Kämmerer creates a kind of seeing machine that executes exactly such a convolution. A concentric metal device is in a state of perpetual rotation. A rhythmical montage involving various perspectives of this movement is to be seen. Reflective metallic segments give an appearance of interlocking crescents mirroring an environment that remains largely unknown. The rotation of the machine shuffles an increasingly dense array of glass, steel, and mechanical distortions – also of an organic and psychedelic quality. Meanwhile, the tangle of reflections turns opposite to the direction of the image generator. Circuits turn within circuits, as if Marcel Duchamp´s Anemic Cinema has come back to life in a new sculptural skin. NAVIGATOR picks up where loose ends of Modernism dangle, and it projects into yet untrodden territory: Steel and dazzling chrome frame reflective glass, a combination that does not yield cold functionality but rather an unforeseen abundance of form; a form of self-reflexivity that disables recognition of what is inside and what is out – although both categories are relentlessly in play; a measurement of space that interlocks object and subject, matter and access to such a degree that a new kind of space emerges. As such, NAVIGATOR renders a polymorphous construction of sight that cancels opposites and simultaneously establishes its very own incisions, notches and intervals. (Christian Höller)
Translation: Eve Heller
In NAVIGATOR, Björn Kämmerer films a set of vertical mirrors with bevelled edges in monumental close-up, and vigourously edits them in a back-and-forward motion that offers a dizzying array of Cubist perspectives. (TIFF)
NAVIGATOR
2015
Austria
7 min