Light Space Modulators

A solo exhibition by HC Gilje (NO)

Conversations with Light, Sound and Architecture

HC Gilje spent more than 10 years developing a unique approach to the intersection between visual art, performance art, and live improvisation. Although his formal education is in the fine arts, he has always worked with film, video, light, stage, music and computers. One of his first notable videos, ‘H.K.Mark 1’ from 1998, is an example of this approach. Based on video shoots of unplanned walks in Hong-Kong, it is a complex formation of loops, compositions, and fast and slow motion sequences tightly integrated with the soundtrack, resulting from the direct experience of the walker.

In 2001, HC Gilje started ‘242.pilots’ with Kurt Ralske and Lukasz Lysakowski. The trio was one of the most interesting video-improvisation art ensembles exploring live cinema, a genre (re-)discovered at that time, with the appearance of new realtime video software opening up new territories for performing with sound and image. 242.pilots toured across Europe and America, mainly in contemporary art centres and new media art festivals. The 242.pilots experience culminated in ‘Live in Bruxelles’, a concert produced by iMAL in 2002 and published on DVD by Carpark (NY) (winning the image award at Transmediale 2003, Berlin).

Throughout these past years, HC Gilje has played with theatre collectives (e.g. kreutzerkompani, Verdensteatret) as well as with musicians (Yannis Kyriakides, Justin Bennett, Kelly Davis, Maja Ratkje, jazzkamer), expanding his audiovisual grammar in live contexts, generated through real-time or improvisation processes. With the former he developed moving images on stage, while collaboration with the latter produced various concerts and performances, as well as video works like Night for Day (released on the DVD, Cityscapes, Lowave, Paris).

HC Gilje is most certainly a digital artist: his main instrument is the computer and he has developed his own software, as is typical in this digital world when one wants to freely explore and do research. The digital world often implies abstraction and distance from the specificities of the physical world: everything is reduced to being data-processed by the same ubiquitous digital machinery – computers and networks – whether it represents a human or an object, and whether it is here or there, past or present... But HC Gilje’s attitude suggests a utopian alternative (Mitchell Whitelaw). His art is deeply rooted in experience in and with the physical world, in the particular and singular act performed in a particular place at a particular time and with particular people. He designs his real-time digital tools to maximise his freedom in a live situation, to feel and experience the specific context and its materiality, and to elaborate audiovisual dialogues using the power of simulation and computer generated illusions that intensify our sense of being in the world. 

For his first solo exhibition at iMAL, HC will develop a site-specific work, in continuation of the research he began a few years ago on the relationship between light and space. Here, he is playing with the architecture, which actually becomes the actor that will issue a reply to his minimal, abstract, audiovisual compositions. The conversations become subtle and bi-directional, setting-up a dialectic in which each discourse is modified by the others: light modulates space and space modulates light. As spectators, we are walking inside a total sculpture (an extension of László Moholy-Nagy's Theatre of Totality) and experiencing the multiple inter-modalities, interferences, modulations and resonances between the pure elements of light, sound, shape and concrete structure.

About HC Gilje

For nearly a decade, Norwegian artist HC Gilje (1969, Kongsberg) has explored in his works the potential of using video projections as light sources.

In 1999-2000, he developed the project VideoNervous as his first experiment in projecting video into three-dimensional spaces and onto physical bodies. In 2008, HC Gilje released VPT, a free, multipurpose realtime projection software for Mac and Windows.

HC Gilje works with installations, live performance, set design and single-channel video. Gilje has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues, theatres and cinemas, galleries, festivals, outdoors and through several international DVD releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave. He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of dance company kreutzerkompani. Gilje initiated the project "Conversations with spaces" (while working as a research fellow at Kunstakademiet in Bergen 2006-9) where he explores how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces. HC lives and works in Bergen (NO). He was educated at Kunstakademiet in Trondheim 95-99.

Hc Gilje's recent work 'Blink' was part of the 'Trust' exhibition, ISEA 2010, Dortmund.

More on http://hcgilje.com

Further Reading:
After the Screen, Array Aesthetics and Transmateriality by Mitchell Whitelaw

Practical Info

Opening / Vernissage:
Friday, April 29, 18:00-23:00

Opening Hours
Wednesday > Sunday: 12:30 - 18:30

Free Admission

Venue: iMAL

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Credits

A production of iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology
In collaboration with Art Brussels and with the support of the Norwegian Embassy, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and the Norsk Kulturråd.