25 Secrets

Young Chicagoan Eric Fleischauer loves his parents and has betrayed all of his girlfriends. These are two of the twenty-five handwritten secrets that the artist has photographed, turned into a brief sequence of images, and then included in his otherwise abstract animated film, 25 Secrets.

Security patterns, which protect the content of and secrets contained in the letters from prying eyes, form the hypnotizing environment for his secrets. Distracted by the patterns, which are constantly in motion - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly - the viewer can barely make out the cross-faded messages, since they are attached in sequences of twenty-five frames per second instead of the usual twenty-four. Along with the folded and torn papers that keep popping up between the patterns, they produce an abstract visual collage that turns the recipient into an unsatisfied voyeur. With the abstract structures of the envelopes, the artist reflects on early twentieth-century films or Op Art from the sixties.

In the process, he guides the eye away from the inside of the envelope toward the external conditions of modern society. By allowing his credit card numbers to be seen, Fleischauer tosses the viewer back to his or her own secrets, raising the question of security in the omnipresent local, national, and global stream of data. In this way, the artist participates in the current debate over 'transparent people'. (Dennis Hochköppeler)