Ricarda Roggan
21 Jan - 10 Mar 2012
RICARDA ROGGAN
Set | Reset
21 January – 10 March, 2012
The Past of an Illusion
With her newest work SET/RESET Ricarda Roggan moves a step back into the future.
Seven large format colour photographs show strange artefacts that only at second glimpse reveal themselves as penny arcade machines: those encapsulated simulations in which the »user« is meant to cherish the illusion of being a pilot of sports cars or airplanes with the help of a steering wheel, gearshift and gas pedal.
The interfaces of fiction though – the screens – are dead and covered with dust, like the seats and dashboards: these relicts of a short era seem to have missed the complete transition from the analogue to the digital and are, like all artefacts in Ricarda Roggan's work, left behind and languish their existence in the niches and gaps of history.
Compared to the furnishings in Tisch, Stuhl und Bett, the settings of imagination in Attika or the damaged cars in Garage, the functional expiring date of these instruments was much shorter than their physical existence: they were already outdated when they entered the race. The real time, which they made stop in simulating speed, went past them nearly without a trace. They were literally outmoded from the beginning, as their main task was to eliminate time. In consequence, they don't have a space of their own; the selected photographic details with their seamless appearance resulting from the hanging that reminds of a film sequence don't reveal their location or their relationship towards the space, nor do they give a hint about their natural properties.
Inoperative, out of order, they appear like »shells of the invisible«, which is also the title of a crucial work by Ricarda Roggan's teacher Timm Rautert from the early 80ies, in two respects. But while the contemporary containers of the digital, from telephone to high-performance computers, dissimulate their functionality completely, these sturdy simulators still show their original purpose. They are constructed after human (body-) measurements without being appropriate to the human. The (physical) experience they provided and withheld at the same time remained ineffective: RESET, back to start.
The three works of the series SET, also shot in 8x10" format, turn around the perspective. They open up the space that was excluded in RESET – a space as non-transparent in its own disorder as the order of the nonentities in RESET. While they appear like forgotten Science-Fiction requisites from the 60ies, when the future was a technological promise, the spaces in SET remind of a gloomy 80ies-dystopia. Both are historic.
Falk Haberkorn
Set | Reset
21 January – 10 March, 2012
The Past of an Illusion
With her newest work SET/RESET Ricarda Roggan moves a step back into the future.
Seven large format colour photographs show strange artefacts that only at second glimpse reveal themselves as penny arcade machines: those encapsulated simulations in which the »user« is meant to cherish the illusion of being a pilot of sports cars or airplanes with the help of a steering wheel, gearshift and gas pedal.
The interfaces of fiction though – the screens – are dead and covered with dust, like the seats and dashboards: these relicts of a short era seem to have missed the complete transition from the analogue to the digital and are, like all artefacts in Ricarda Roggan's work, left behind and languish their existence in the niches and gaps of history.
Compared to the furnishings in Tisch, Stuhl und Bett, the settings of imagination in Attika or the damaged cars in Garage, the functional expiring date of these instruments was much shorter than their physical existence: they were already outdated when they entered the race. The real time, which they made stop in simulating speed, went past them nearly without a trace. They were literally outmoded from the beginning, as their main task was to eliminate time. In consequence, they don't have a space of their own; the selected photographic details with their seamless appearance resulting from the hanging that reminds of a film sequence don't reveal their location or their relationship towards the space, nor do they give a hint about their natural properties.
Inoperative, out of order, they appear like »shells of the invisible«, which is also the title of a crucial work by Ricarda Roggan's teacher Timm Rautert from the early 80ies, in two respects. But while the contemporary containers of the digital, from telephone to high-performance computers, dissimulate their functionality completely, these sturdy simulators still show their original purpose. They are constructed after human (body-) measurements without being appropriate to the human. The (physical) experience they provided and withheld at the same time remained ineffective: RESET, back to start.
The three works of the series SET, also shot in 8x10" format, turn around the perspective. They open up the space that was excluded in RESET – a space as non-transparent in its own disorder as the order of the nonentities in RESET. While they appear like forgotten Science-Fiction requisites from the 60ies, when the future was a technological promise, the spaces in SET remind of a gloomy 80ies-dystopia. Both are historic.
Falk Haberkorn