LUNA PARK was a video interactive project, which played almost literally on the card of communication/dis-communication. Today we have to have digitized/numbered cards to live properly, to go to the bank, or to enter a hotel room. Although instead of the digitized card the visitors of the Luna Park got a paper with a personal number printed in red, both elements, the red color and the old, slow printed device, delivering the number, were used to underline the artists’ socialist background. After receiving his or her personal number, the visitor or user had to insert the number in a computer installed in a huge red box, or better to say, a doom. The result was a multiscreen projection of a unique, personal story composed from images about the war in ex-Yugoslavia, history, love, sex, etc. A unique story was composed randomly from inserts from Grzinic and Smid video and film works, which were selected and edited by a computer. To each number belonged a unique, approximately 2-minute-long story. Moreover, every time the same number was inserted into the computer, the same two-minute story was replayed. The visitor or user could replay, re-memorize, and repeat his or her personal story indefinitely. Only one visitor was allowed to enter the red dome, and it was not possible to see the projection of his or her personal story from outside the red dome.
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With LUNA PARK we grasp the communication/dis-communication topic, so to speak, from within, as all the personal numbers were selected randomly by the computer and all the personal stories, too. The visitor got his or her personal media space/ that is one of the most difficult tasks of any art media project- due to the general and constant globalization tendency of mass and digital media, but then he or she realized that this most inner private space was something completely randomly generated, was a product of the machine and not of a deep empathetic intercommunication. The result was a machine in real time
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The structure of his or her intimate space, and the communication with it, was a result of a machine in real time that was falling apart from time to time in real time, underlying errors, short circuits, the computer itself from time to time randomly selected instead of his or her personal story an interface error situation.
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Intercommunication Center ICC in Tokyo, as part of the ICC Media Biennial Manifestation, 1997
Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid: interactive video installation with the title LUNA PARK
The installation visually and theoretically focused on the topic of communication/dis-communication, proposed by the organizers as the topic of this first ICC Biennial Manifestation in 1997.
