Ken Feingold
«The Surprising Spiral»

Using a sculptural interface, viewers of «The Surprising Spiral» gain access to a large hypertext. Travel photography from all parts of the world and their constantly disordered connections remain the lasting impression. The materials are ordered in the form of a nonlinear montage. The spiral metaphor of the title refers to the eternal recurrence of images, and to their changing weights and emotional statements. Various types of documentation, advertising spots, and sequences from feature films collide with one another. And yet the overall impression is meditative. Many of the sequences are overloaded with terms and the lines of titles. This hinders a purely documentary-oriented reception of the whole while it also forms a level of reflection that considers questions of perception, and the conveying content through the media. In this work, different visual languages stand unexpectedly beside one another, with their messages and deeper sense displaced by the disintegration of the original context. The crass contradiction between nature and civilization, between treetops and blocks of architecture, refers to questions regarding the essence of human culture and its representation transmitted through the media’s imagery or with language and text.
Although Ken Feingold repeatedly formulates an almost cynical mistrust of one’s dealings with technologies, his works consistently demonstrate their possible use.