The CAMOUFLAGE STUDIES series arose out of the research work I was doing on camouflage materials at the Chicago New Bauhaus around the 1942 period. Camouflage was the subject of a lecture which György Kepes gave there about war, offering a training course for camoufleurs. I interpret camouflage in my work as a game of hide-and-seek involving media techniques and technologies, and use it on panoramatic visual material.
In the panorama, the channels peculiar to photographic depiction (such as colour, black-and-white or negatives) are run through in a gliding way, and as a result, the panorama loses its synoptic function to an external reality. The CAMOUFLAGE STUDIES, which have to be scanned like a movie film because of their wide format, vary according to the different aggregate states of mediatisation. Hence photography changes from being an analogon of the real to becoming a camouflage technique and I myself become a camoufleur. The choice of a part of a meadow as a motif in this respect reminds us that all camouflage techniques originated in painting.
Katarina Matiasek, 2004
medialabmadrid.org
In the panorama, the channels peculiar to photographic depiction (such as colour, black-and-white or negatives) are run through in a gliding way, and as a result, the panorama loses its synoptic function to an external reality. The CAMOUFLAGE STUDIES, which have to be scanned like a movie film because of their wide format, vary according to the different aggregate states of mediatisation. Hence photography changes from being an analogon of the real to becoming a camouflage technique and I myself become a camoufleur. The choice of a part of a meadow as a motif in this respect reminds us that all camouflage techniques originated in painting.
Katarina Matiasek, 2004
medialabmadrid.org