Alex Antener “Ich denke, das bin ich”
Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Dump Time / Artists
Alex Antener (CH): “Ich denke, das bin ich”, 2005 (videostill)
Ich denke, das bin ich (I think, this is me)
Installation, various media and materials, 2005/2011
“For a period of three months A.A. slept, at his home, underneath a research installation of the tinkerer A.A.” – that is the beginning of Alex Antener’s description of his project “I think, this is me”. Night after night, audio-visual equipment records what escapes the sleepers perception: his talking during sleep, the movements of his body. In this self-referential research project, the artist assumes three roles: as sleeping individual, he is the subject of the research experiment; at the same time he is the one who set up the whole experiment, he is the tinkerer (bricoleur); and he analyses, evaluates, assesses the research material and (re)exploits the material in his work.
Besides himself he involved two other sleepers in his project. Their utterances were transmitted to Antener’s bedroom in real time, in order to investigate possible communication between sleepers. In short video scenes Antener, with parodistic intent, not only internalises the scientific zeal to obtain empirical knowledge about sleep and the sleeper, he also refers to the approaches and techniques of the surrealists, or of the philosopher René Descartes. The legend goes that Descartes had three dreams that were particularly meaningful to him, that lead him to the formulation of the rationalistic precept “Cogito, ergo sum” – I think, therefore I am – in the year 1641. Antener’s focal point of research is not a thinking subject but a subject not willing to be defined in binary categories, a subject hovering in indeterminate and ambiguous zones, between sleep and waking, seriousness and parody, research and staging, intimacy and theatre.