We designed, constructed and staged a room-sized work called The Return of the Other for our solo exhibition at BAS konsthall. It was the world premiere of this piece (although there was a predecessor 15 years earlier, then entitled The Other situated at the artist-run gallery Hammarby ArtPort).
This work is inspired by the artist Dan Graham’s Time Delay Room as well as other relevant video works from the 70s, generally known under the moniker of closed circuit installations. Art created by a direct feedback between one or several image sources and the video display, an on-going stream occasionally submitted to real-time manipulation such as delay and compositing, appears to be relevant in the age of ubiquitous social media, surveillance and its connection generative AI. The circuit seems to be closed this time up.
What happens when the other is in another room, in another time? A Beckettian scenario. Attempts to make contact are hopeless, almost laughable. We live on the same planet, sometimes in the same city, but our circumstances are incompatible. We live in different realities. The two rooms (one of which is fictional) are connected in a believable way, wall to wall like a doll's house in cross-section. Like the Renaissance painters, we therefore study the central perspective, its claim to objectivity and how the correctly diverging lines are to be achieved through the focal length of the camera lens and its position. We soon realise that the space (usually a rectangular story) has to be altered, to be 'wrong' in order to be 'right' on camera. What is at stake is nothing less than the establishment of a fiction, the rules of the game of an agreement that what is shown is actually happening "for real" (suspension of disbelief)*.
The introduction of a doppelganger is what distinguishes the Other and the Other Goes Again from the more generalised applications of a delayed video signal. The double, it is thought, must be an identical figure in appearance. Here, however, it is a question of someone else being in exactly the same situation as ourselves, in the same room, but perhaps not at the same time. And by identifying such a double, a direct reflection of our own situation - perhaps we become aware of how we relate to our own situation?
The original the Other at Hammarby ArtPort was performed by Simon Norrthon. At the opening, the audience could take part in a unique performance for the evening, either by peeking in through the doorway or - as most people did - by watching a projection on the dance floor. It was a grand tribute to the art of acting - where a lone actor, with no co-stars and no script nor direction - improvised a wordless chamber drama against himself. Simon vs. Simon.
For 45 full minutes, there was complete silence and the audience followed a sequence of events unfolding. A full 15 years later, Simon Norrthon is back in a new room we built just for him - this time at BAS Konsthall. The undefined office with its sparse furnishings, clearly a workplace of some kind but unclear of what kind, is to be haunted by the lonely man's "bodily ruminations" and the tentative feeling that the job consists of nothing more than being in place between these four walls. He discovers the aesthetic possibilities of the almost completely empty space: its sometimes creaking, sometimes producing noisy sounds, the smell of gingerbread and the breathtaking freedom of just being here and now. No other actor could have done it justice.
Ahead of the exhibition at BAS Konsthall, we were prompted to take stock of our catalogue of works and we soon realised that doppelgangers are an unspoken theme in much of our work. Perhaps it has to do with our contemporary obsession with authenticity and its opposite "deep fake"? All those marketing fetishes that revolve around a unique brand, the art that emphasises the big names, asserting one's own person and thus climbing the social hierarchies. Our counter move; cloning, copying and claiming that the copy is just as valuable as the original, is perhaps a cry for the postmodernism that never happened.