_ prepared table | Ulrike Grossarth

prepared table

Siegen, Budapest, Madrid, 2008/09

The project started out from the first published illustration of a dark space as camera obscura for the observation of a solar eclipse, taken from Peter Apian’s and Gemma Frisius’s Cosmographia of 1584. The sun as a cosmic constant drawn in perspective shows the inversion of interior and exterior, as it were, inasmuch as it becomes an object of human perception projected into the spatial representations of the earthly environment. My aim was to use theatrical paper dummies to ‘imitate’ camera obscura representations in 16th and 18th-century engravings, in such a way, however, as to project the whole process into a single room. What mattered to me most of all was the hole in the camera plate, where the external information is transformed into an internal effect.