Viktoria Schmid

A self-built screen amid an expansive green landscape. On it dance silhouettes of the surrounding trees and bushes. A natural cinema – without a darkened cinema hall, without artificial light and without film. From various camera positions, Viktoria Schmid portrays her screen, installed in the sculpture park of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as a moving image within a moving image.

Schmid builds her own projection screens ranging from aspect ratios currently in use (in this case 4:3, the format she uses the most often, 16mm being her primary medium) to entirely fictitious ones (the 4:1 Viktoriascope) and if possible she then films them in the exact same aspect ratio. While at the Djerassi Artist in Residency Program in California, the artist constructed a screen with wood and canvas and installed it in the program’s sculpture park. Still standing there, it is an unexpected object on the way to a scenic view of the rolling hills on the Djerassi property. In A proposal to project in 4:3, Schmid shot this site-specific installation over the course of a single day when the screen became projection surface for the subtle interplay of shadow and light from the surrounding trees and shrubs. Cinema without film. (Claudia Slanar)

A film loop showing the similarity of the artist and her sister in 240 16mm single-frame portraits. The individual frames were recorded one after the other in camera without any editing in post-production. Due to the phi-phenomenon, the rhythmically fast cutting of the individual portraits becomes a mixed portrait of both faces. Alternating and increasing, the series of frames changes from one to a series of four portraits per person. At this pace, the eye is able to perceive a difference.