Filmoteka Muzeum

In Disturbance Szczerek employed excerpts from the Polish Film Chronicle, which ws motivated by the will to address a “universally known”, “canonical” moving image narrative formula – the most internalised by potential viewers. The artist processed the film footage appropriately (by erasing entire fragments – complete with soundtrack – which were replaced with empty white boards or “chessboards” composed of alternating fields of white and fields with fragments of film material) – he thus wished to activate, at the expense of perceptive data, a range of conceptual “programmes and instructions” related to the mental representation of that narrative formula of film.

Impelling the viewer to “add” or “reconstruct” information erased from the Chronicle, Szczerek analysed the phenomenon of the functioning of cognitive processes as taking course in the mode of inference, in constant conditioning of perception (sensual data) and concepts. In his text Questions of Excess of Information as a Study of the Internal Model of the World – Theoretical Outline, the artist wrote: “When the amount of signals is not sufficient to decode a message, missing information is supplemented, therefore the knowledge programmed in the internal model of the world is imposed on perception”. And further: “through experiments consisting in controlling the amount of information with such methods as: filtering, cutting out or masking (...), I try to grasp the structure and properties of the internal model of the world.

Quoted from: Ł. Ronduda, Strategie subwersywne w sztukach medialnych, Cracow 2006.
 

(ŁR)