Volume
The single-channel video Volume by Polish artist Mateusz Sadowski illustrates the connection between two rooms, the real one and a three-dimensional computer-animated room.
To begin with, the viewer is immersed visually in a black and white everyday scene full of resignation and melancholy. Turning on the electric kettle activates the protagonist’s imagination and animated waves materialise on the walls in predefined rectangular areas. As soon as the protagonist starts to drink, the animation spreads itself over a larger area and gives the impression that it could engulf everything – it spreads itself over nature and technology and absorbs them. At the animated level, water, essential for life, becomes a threat for its creator. The whole composition, constantly permeated by noise and digital interference, is underlaid by a threatening, distorted acoustical background, composed by Sadowski himself, which follows the peaks and troughs of the waves.
During the fully animated scenes, the viewer sees in slow motion how the objects are encased by the water and parts of the picture break up sporadically. The act of capturing the circle with a teacup upended by the hand is here indicating a paradox: Mankind may be the creator and master of technics but is also dependent on it. Only through a great act of will, almost transformed into a performance, can the protagonist free himself from this field of conflict, subdue the symbolic circle of this discourse and literally step out of his accustomed habitat into a new (better?) life. (Soma Elena Kozan)
About the video
About the artist
- 1984, POL.
Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, POL