Peter Weibel

Virtual Tetrahedron

The photo shows a camera pointed at a white corner of a wall. Around this corner a two-pronged pattern is glued with black tape.
Artists
Peter Weibel
Title
Virtual Tetrahedron
Year
1978/1980
Medium / Material / Technic
closed-circuit video installation;2 cameras, video mixer, screen, paper, ink
Size / Duration
300 × 300 × 300 cm

At first you see in the room only an abstract tangle of lines on walls and floor. On the screen, however, a tetrahedron becomes visible. If you step into the tangle of lines, some lines of the tetrahedron disappear behind your body, and some lines appear in front of your body. As you move, the lines of the geometrical object move from front to back, and from back to front. The space becomes unreal, for the screen presents the space in a way that it does not really exist. This is done by a camera recording lines with their perspective distorted which become parts of the tetrahedron on the screen. A second camera records the missing parts from a drawing on the wall. Via a mixer, the images of both cameras form the virtual tetrahedron on the screen. When you step into the maze of lines, the lines from the second camera cross your body and seem to be unreal. The real lines of the first camera are covered by your body. The spatial body only exists virtually on the screen.