Viktoria Binschtok
«Schienen/Railroadtracks»

Like in «Globes,» the work entitled «Schienen» (Railroad Tracks) also deals with photographs of objects from private origins, hidden in the Internet behind a specific term. In the case of the term «Schienen,» this concerns the individual parts found under the heading Model Trains, and the huge amount of relevant digital-image data retrieved in the Worldwide Web – probably because of the popularity of the model trains hobby – is vastly represented.
When carefully viewing this wealth of railroad-track imagery, one realizes that those who post these images are confronted with an essential decision: to place the images in chaos or with a certain sense of order in our field of vision.
The chaos principle can be understood as an arbitrary ordering, comparable to what invariably happens when you empty a box of model trains on the floor. The chaos would be different time after time, but the appearance of a disordered mix-up remains unchanged.
Deciding to have the individual pieces comply with a sense of order is linked with a creative act on the author’s part. But the criteria for the railroad-track pattern would remain unknown.
The photographs chosen by the artist show abstract and arbitrarily-generated formations of the described images. Since the images finally hang decontextualized on the wall, the uninformed viewer can barely assign them to a genre. And for being abstractions, even the railroad tracks – though familiar objects to us – are barely recognizable. Only the title offers an indication of what we see.