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«Ping Pong»

With the ball and raquet you have to try to hit the dots that appear on the screen. A film to play with – a players' film.
Stripped of semantics, the relationship between viewer and screen becomes clear: stimulus and reaction. The aesthetic of conventional film is a physiology of behaviour, its mode of communication a perceptual event. 'Ping Pong' explicates the relationship of power between producer (director, screen) and consumer (viewer). In it, what the eye tells the brain occasions motor reflexes and responses. 'Ping Pong' makes visible the ideological conditions. Viewer and screen are partners in a game with rules dictated by the director, a game requiring screen and viewer to come to terms with each other. To this extent, the viewer's response is active. But the controlling character of the screen could not be demonstrated more clearly: no matter how involved the viewer becomes with the game and plays with the screen, his status as consumer is hardly affected – or not at all.

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