Proposal for video installation - Rune Peitersen 2006

“Ultimately reality exists only as projected light. We are stages on light’s path. The whole of technology is a late cult of the sun.”
Paul Virilio

The video installation Cave is an attempt to construct the Cave allegory from Plato’s ‘The Republic’.
The viewer is led into a closed space in which he is confronted with a large (8*8*4m) box structure. This is constructed of thick black felt hanging from the ceiling to the floor. Two corner-entrances in the ‘curtain’ are highlighted by spotlights. The viewer passes through either of these and enters the box. Inside there is no light except what seeps through the crevices in and above the curtain. In the center of the space there is a black house/cathedral/temple-like construction (6*3*4m, wooden structure covered in black cloth/felt). The structure has an entrance with a curtain at one end. Inside this structure the viewer is presented with a projection of the Fire video (projected on the far back wall, directly opposite of the entrance). The video consists of seven 2 minute fragments of stylized figures and actions. The video is shot in a manner which make the images appear as one could imagine the shadow images on the wall in the Cave appear to the prisoners in the original story.
The viewer thus finds himself in utter darkness in a cave-like setting trying to decipher and contextualize the flame/shadow images on the wall, just as the prisoners do.

Upon exiting he can easily backtrack but as he exits the final curtain he is blinded by the spotlight aimed at the point of exit from outside. This is a representation of the sun in Plato’s story, and causes the viewer to see ‘spots’ until his eyes accommodate to the light ‘outside’.

The installation is just as much about the viewer’s journey out of the cave and back to ‘the real world’ as it is concerned with the journey into and the experiences in the cave.