Peter Weibel

If you stand in »Die Wand, der Vorhang (Grenze, die), fachsprachlich auch: Lascaux« [The Wall, the Curtain (Border, the), Technically also: Lascaux] in front of the projection of a brick wall, your image is captured by a camera and appears with a short time delay as a silhouette in the projection. There, every movement of your body triggers a distortion of the image. In reality you are standing in front of the wall; in the image you are behind the wall. You become part of the image you see, you are part of what you observe. While humans can normally only observe the real world from their internal perspective, digital technology enables them to take a viewpoint virtually outside the world or behind the wall. Weibel’s interactive computer installation refers to the origins of image production, the cave paintings of Lascaux. At the same time, he conceives a technological reinterpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave, which can be understood as a philosophical archetype for questions pertaining to perception and knowledge of the world. For Plato, the world is a cave in which humanity is trapped. For Aristotle, the world is a stage and the human being an external observer who cannot intervene in the stage, the laws of nature. For Weibel, the world is a curtain into which humans are interwoven and which they (as internal observers) can change.