Thorbjørn Lausten
New works
Stalke Galleri
Vesterbrogade 14A
23.08.02 to 27.09.02
Stalke Galleri presented an exhibition of works by Thorbjørn Lausten.
The exhibition featured new light works, three rooms with neon—one of which was created specifically for the gallery—and a series of paper works produced over the preceding years.
The paper works consisted of sketches or preliminary studies for works, light rooms, and light projections that primarily addressed the relationship between light, time, and space—something generally taken for granted but which, upon closer examination, revealed itself to be complex. The light rooms used light sources that were either permanently lit or programmed to turn on and off at set intervals. This achieved what might be described as a measurement of time, the only concrete relationship one can have to time. It was these measurements or intervals, visualized with light, that formed a temporal extension. A relationship to time, as one might experience it, was presented as a subjective image of time, tied to everyday use of multiple time scales.
The exhibition also included a series of preparatory studies for the visualization of data, forming part of an upcoming exhibition using data from the scientific satellite SOHO, which transmitted data from the sun. These works were to be shown as large-scale video projections when the continuous stream of transmissions was displayed via the internet—a project that built on earlier works such as Light-Numbers(1991), Now–The Polar Space(1996), and Glimmer(2001). A work of this nature involved the use of highly electronic technology and thus referred to contemporary understandings of reality, which were largely based on technologically produced images. These works functioned as expressions of so-called techno-imagination. The relationship between the image and the technologically linear function that generated it proved to be far more complex than generally assumed and was only indirectly suggested within the exhibition context.
Both the light rooms and the light projections largely concerned the visualization of concepts, placing the viewer within a broader discussion touching on culture: the relationship between image and text, and between primarily visual and conceptual understandings of reality. In the video projections, some of which remained sketch-like, there was a direct relationship between data and visualization. Algorithms were used to visualize this relationship, giving the work a tangible content equivalent to the applied data itself.
Installation views from Thorbjørn Lausten’s light exhibition at Stalke Galleri, 2002.