Flying Tape

Žilvinas Kempinas is an artist I've only recently known about. When talking to a friend about my obsession with fans (ventilators) he told me about this installation he saw in Paris. He had no idea who the artist was but with some extensive research I managed to track him down. I found the work seen in Paris (Flying Tape) and learned more about the artist and his other projects. A lot of his work has sound as a by product and he's obsessed with magnetic tape.

'Flying Tape' features an enormous circular loop of tape filling the entire space, floating and spinning in mid air. The tape is held aloft by a vortex of air created by seven industrial fans pointed outward toward the gallery walls. As the tape spins, it slowly ascends and descends, allowing the viewer to step inside its circle.

The installation achieves its serene monumentality through the careful calibration of the given architectural characteristics of the space and the introduced elements of the fans. ‘Flying Tape’ emphasizes videotape’s contradictory materiality, its surprising strength and flexibility, yet barely-there lightness: the installation is both subject to, yet magically defiant of gravity.

With the growing ubiquity of digital recording technologies, the simple magic of the first VCR’s is becoming ever more remote, and the actual material of analogue videotape, slowly obsolete. Kempinas’ installation manages to re-engage with the metaphorical power of tape as a recording medium. The literal and perceptual feats that ‘Flying Tape’ achieves, serves to powerfully extend tape’s virtuality and transformative potential into an entirely new physical domain.

http://www.spencerbrownstonegallery.com/

Tube

TUBE (created at the Atelier Calder, Saché, France) can be described as a translucent tunnel of parallel lines, created with magnetic tape. Žilvinas Kempinas’ TUBE “resonates with the environment of the floating city and creates a space where vision and movement are linked by means of the body. TUBE addresses the physical and optical experiences of the viewer, and the passage of time, while creating the feeling of being inside and outside simultaneously. One can describe TUBE metaphorically or geometrically but to be appreciated it must be experienced directly. No image can convey the gradual accumulation of sensory experiences awaiting visitors who pass through the translucent tunnel of parallel lines. Kempinas changes the function of magnetic tape from an information carrier to a linear map of time and space.”
(Excerpt from the press release).

White Noise

Žilvinas Kempinas uses unspooled videotape as a material to create unique works which encourage us to consider tape as both physical object and container of information.

Moving on from his gravity-defying works, such as Double O, in which large shimmering loops of tape are levitated in space by industrial fans, White Noise more explicitly refers to videotape as moving image medium. Viewers enter a dark, almost cinematic space and are confronted by what appears to be a large projection screen of pixelated static. The screen vibrates with the fragmented black and white pixels we associate with an untuned video source. A low hum and fluttering sound reinforce the connotation. As viewers move forward, they become aware that the screen is actually hundreds of strands of videotape stretched in horizontal bands vibrated by air currents created by a multitude of fans.

The obsolescent medium of tape is employed to evoke the flickering visual sensation of noise, thus creating a formal resonance with Ryoji Ikeda’s installation of monochrome pixels and digits in the Exhibition Hall.

Kempinas shows us that videotape is more than merely a neutral carrier of virtual moving images. He uses tape to extend its virtuality, transforming it into a medium of futurity, which sculpts and redefines space.

Zilvinas Kempinas is represented by Yvon Lambert in Paris and New York, and Vartai Gallery in Vilnius