Peter Weibel
«The Dream of Everyone Having the Same Consciousness»

This three-part installation influences the perception of shape and colour in accordance with various specific closed-circuit set-ups. In Part 1, an angled form shown on two monitors stacked one on top of the other becomes a distorted square. In Part 2 (picture), an ellipse in the real space becomes a circle on the monitor, matched exactly by a pencil-drawn circle superimposed over it and recorded by a Polaroid camera. In Part 3, Weibel works with neon light and delayed mixing of the primary electronic colours red, green, blue. These formal analyses of the phenomena of the video-specific feedback effect illustrate the difference between the reality of the space and the monitor image. According to Peter Weibel, they cancel out the 'homogeneity of time and space'. Just as the title implies, equal consciousness is only a dream, since the unstable feedback processes are not a question of information exchange, but of communication which influences receiver and transmitter alike.