Catalogue > At random

The natural and technological landscape in the Rotterdam port meet in a scouring way. This phenomenon is captured with a glass camera eye. A slightly more literal eye than usual in this analogy: the glass lens is hollow, hand-blown and only functions as a lens when filled with water. The water in the lens is extracted from the channel and sea on the spot. Small contaminants from the water are thus indirectly recorded as pollution particles that float through the water lens, just like the strings that everyone sometimes sees floating in front of his or her eye. The Dutch water landscape is photographed through the water from the landscape in front of us. The shooting technique used is just as hybrid as the subject itself. The camera is a DIY digital model with an old flatbed scanner as a light-sensitive plate. This produces miraculous time-space deformations, for example on the rotor blades of the windmills. These are not retrofitted filters, but deformations that take place inside the camera. Time proves to be all the more elastic. In addition, a game is played with the photographic image of the material world and its classical elements: water, earth, air and fire. Despite the corona crisis prevailing at the time of the shooting, the harbor appears to be an enormous living entity, a robot or a Leviathan with its own pulse of life.

Michiel van Bakel (1966, Deurne NL) studied astronomy (Leiden university) and psychology (Nijmegen university) for several years before he chose for autonomous visual art, at art school (Den Haag and Arnhem). Van Bakel expresses himself through film and videos, sculpture and installations. His work focuses on people and their surroundings, often resulting in a poetic reality. It conveys a fascination for the tension between man and technology, perception of time in our delicate man-made ecosystem. ‘When I look around, I see a lot of technology that aims to constrain reality in predictability, by categorizing and automating. I want to use technology to evoke wonder and transcend reality and predictability. I like to visualize things that were previously unseen and, in that sense, enrich my experience of reality. That is for me the incentive to make use of experimental video and animation techniques. Devices such as cameras, scanners and image processing algorithms I see as an extension of my senses. With these tools I manipulate images that are like anchors in time for me, but also images from my urban backyard: my 'condition urbaine.' Recurring themes are examining human perception, experiencing time, disorientation and instability.‘