Interview with Vladimir Nikolić.
To begin with, I would like to know the genesis of the Train Passing video. This work belongs to a much broader project that started around the time you were creating video works that played with viewers' perception through the incorporation of small mirrors. In your doctoral thesis you state that "the ideological power of the new visual regime grows as the technology of creating images becomes more complex and invisible, and thus the power that pictures have to ideologically influence the viewer becomes greater". Accordingly, should artists sometimes also hide the process of creation behind an artwork or are you willing to tell us more about the making of Train Passing?
Yes, the more apt ideology is in hiding its modus operandi, the more convincing it becomes. I am not sure that art is supposed to hide or present anything. It seems to me that art is good when it reveals something. However, the genesis of the work we are talking a bout requ ires slightly more extensive explanation. In the series of works entitled Voice Over, which precedes the one with mirrors, I tried to find a way to materialize the interpretative apparatus, whose mechanisms influence the way we see an art work. You do not accidentally come across art in the street, but rather see it in art institutions, which accommodate it for you through their policies, interpolating their perspective to the artist's perspective. For this reason, I made a series of works that create a situation in which you are not sure what to believe, whether to accept it as something you see directly or it is the interpretative apparatus which is doing the "transfer". Yet, in the following series which the work in question is a part of, the question of interpretation has permeated the entire reality, in the way we visually perceive it. Here the intermediary is not the institution but the subject itself, that is, the body, and in modern times, technology. When I say technology, I mean the optical media and the perspectives that have been the dominant shapers of reality since the 15th century, which leads us to the history of painting and film. For this reason, Train Passing refers to film history, namely to its beginnings: the Lurniere brothers' film Arrival ore Train at La Ciofat.
The documentary process behind this work is no secret. The problem of the depth of sharpness, which is an optical phenomenon, has served me as a metaphor for distinguishing reality from its representation. This is easier to understand when watching the work than when it is described, so I'd better not try. when I started experimenting with the rnirrors and the camera, the biggest problem was to explain to myself why, in a completely digital environment, I deal with a hackneyed and wom-out common thing like an optical medium? But, it toms out that only in a digital environment can an optically shaped reality be affirmed to the maximum. Today everyone literally walks through life holding a camera, and erasing the difference between reality and its representation issomething I generally see as a problem. Selling images as reality has been suspicious from the very beginning, and therein lies the motivation for creating this work.