A Vision of Hell Emerges Through a Wooden Screen

Since 1997, Yves Netzhammer has used computers to produce works that include 3D animations, video installations, paintings, architectural constructions, and drawings demonstrating where humanity and reality can quickly break down into various nightmares. His style is usually identifiable: Netzhammer presents faceless, gray 3D figures plopped down inside contructed interior and exterior spaces, usually under some sort of physical or psychological threat. Or, he might explore a space as a type of labyrinth. In animated videos, he frequently designs dreamlike installations that have a lo-fi look.

This is on full display in Netzhammer’s latest work, Days Without Hours, recently exhibited at the Christinger de Mayo gallery in Zürich. The piece features a disc-shaped screen built of wood and attached to a wooden chair, onto which Netzhammer projects a dark, trippy 3D animation. The installation looks as if it is located in a room and not a gallery, with walls outfitted with one of his murals, and a roll of carpet off to the side of the space.

Days Without Hours may conjure thoughts of Dire Straits' “Money for Nothing” music video on hallucinogens, piped through David Lynch’s darkly surrealist sense of humor, but every moment is deliberate. With each frame Netzhammer shines a light on a human reality where nightmares, technology, animals, plants, violence, repetition and transformations abound.

And it’s the moments where objects transform in Netzhammer’s work that are the most interesting. On a daily basis, humans are either altering their environment with technology, or being transformed by their technology and environment. So to look at this in Netzhammer’s nightmarish microworlds is a mind-bending experience: the viewer can’t help but realize that reality truly is the most psychedelic experience of all.

Netzhammer was inspired to create the piece because of an interest in the “phantom of a viewer, alone or in a group, in the luminous glare of the TV,” which he says anyone can encounter while taking a stroll through a city with their dog. For him, the viewers—transfixed by the screen—are like rabbits in front of a snake, “spellbound within the light zone of the moving images.”

This might make passerbys think of George Orwell’s 1984, or Pink Floyd’s rock opera film The Wall, where the main characters are often viewers hypnotized and seduced by images on screens. In Days Without Hours, though, Netzhammer takes this phantom viewer, observed by another, out of the space, with the exhibition visitor encouraged to replace the phantom viewer. Netzhammer hopes that the viewers become aware of this arrangement, which will allow them to break free of screen-based hypnosis.

The irony is that people can now take their screens outside of their living spaces and bedrooms. But Netzhammer is no doubt aware of this. What better way to think about our new smartphone and tablet shackles than by realizing it no longer takes a screen inside a room to hypnotize us like we’re zombies?

Days Without Hours is up through August 24th. For more information click here.

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