Edita Pecotić
2007-2009
video color PAL, 4:3, 192′, silent
[* Trans Adriatic Grey Area]
‘Temporary (Internet) Files’ is a time lapse video which displays seasonal transformations of a landscape. It is made of a series of still photos, collected over the course of a whole year, via ‘temporary internet files’ folder, from the public, online accessible webcam. The video acts as a form of meditation and contemplation on time and the corresponding notion of duration, as well as being a personal diary. By using contemporary technological resources, the work also makes a reference to the perception of time in modern culture. (www.editapecotic.com/temporary/)
“The whole of that time which I spent in the daily ritual of collecting, sorting and rearranging the photographic stills in a timeline, I experienced this process as a type of personal struggle against that inescapable disappearing. Surrendering to those moments where nothing happens, as the transitory is inevitable, I withdrew into a simultaneously sweet and bitter state of contemplation, filled with contented flow of time and the simultaneous interwoven sense of emptiness and helplessness of the moments which are all but gone forever. In this way I followed, from day to day, one whole small world determinedly existing on the edge of fading, which awoke in me a feeling of abandonment into that middle space of reality, imagination and doubt. While the images of the town were lost in the dusk, time, enormous and unreachable, flew from every file, from every adjusted transition. In that careful, attentive following of change and the mute following of time, never knowing if it is about beginnings or endings and in my indecisiveness between documenting reality and running away from it, I tried to make something which is not just a visible window into a piece of reality, but a re-created history which is at the same time real and imagined” (Edita Pecotić)
The diary-like recording of the change between night and day, the weather motions and seasons in the everyday, gained for Edita Pecotić a base for creating a contemporary picture of a virtual reality. Using an additional reality and the compression of familiar images in a three-hour simulation of a new world, she has achieved an effectively geocentric reality where all is in continuous movement while the landscape remains still. There is a significant difference between the scenery in reality and that which the artist has created by organising gathered images into a timeline. Through selection and organisation; choosing details which she deemed significant, the artist has produced a shift from the real into the selective and subjective, thereby creating a process of shifting from the real to the unreal. Thus a familiar view becomes, in the words of Jean Baudillard, “fleeting and interesting electronic pictures elusive of reality”. The ambient simulation of the landscape, created through compressing space and time is a process by which the artist attempts to problematise the space-time relationship and the human role in that relationship” (Zorica Beus, art critic).
