Max Rheiner: “erich”
Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Connect / Artists
Max Rheiner: erich
erich
Interactive installation, 2011
Computer games have made us familiar with the disquieting experience to have to give up one identification for a ‘third person view’, of perceiving one’s own or an adopted body from the outside: for example when, after we have achieved a certain level, all the actions and key moments of the avatar are shortly outlined again – with the player not being able to interfere in any way.
Max Rheiner’s installation goes beyond this simple experience of a forced change in perspective and unfolds a whole range of disturbing and extended conditions of perception and cognition. With the help of HMD-glasses the player is enabled to leave his or her body-centred vision and to shift it to different ‘I stations’ as an out-of-body-experience. The player’s head movements are, in real time, transferred to the control of a robot camera – and the robot’s pictures are played back to the viewer. Moreover, the ‘I stations’ can, interactively, be controlled by other viewers. To this complex setting the artist adds a fictional level, the story of a meanwhile deceased psychiatric patient who interpreted his name as an addition of “er” (he) and “ich” (me, I) as telling omen of his personality disorder. Short video sequences that are intertwined tell Erich’s story, leading to a delusional perception in the viewer because real perceptions in the room are undiscernibly mixed with events that had not happened in reality.
Max Rheiner’s installation links psychotic patterns with knowledge from robot technology and the neuro-cognitive sciences. It is not the rendering of an experience as close to reality as possible the artist is primarily interested in but the irritating force of a setting questioning the construction of the I by splitting it up and decentralising it.