The first frame in Uri Katzenstein’s video Hope Machine is a close up of a young woman looking through a pair of binoculars. She surveys a somewhat uncanny, oily and wavy sea and an empty horizon. A large boat’s horn resounds loudly. The woman is standing alone on a narrow floating structure.
The people seem to be living comfortably on these floating buoys, or perhaps tips of semi-submerged larger structures. The structures themselves are sculptures Katzenstein made by casting packaging materials. Ghost images, negative molds of the appliances and commodities we use, the disposable protective stuff that is always dumped – just as the people we see deserted in the middle of an infinite ocean.
In fact, issues pertaining to the relevancy of languages and human communication are a constant concern in Uri Katzenstein’s work and a tool he uses to characterize the immense time spans along which his works are located. By creating languages, conventions and means of physical communication, Katzenstein hints at times as yet undefined and unknown. An unspoken or unrecognized language is either very old, or one that would surface sometime in the distant future. An unfamiliar language from a time unknown can also indicate a desire to communicate from one distant time to another, form one civilization to another, from one planet to another.
Non-verbal communication plays an important role in Hope Machine. However, in this work it consists of familiar acts and signs.
The enigmatic surroundings, in which Katzenstein’s videos take place, emphasize the immense time span that justifies these communicational gaps.
It is hardly surprising, then, that his brand of post-apocalyptic robot is present in Hope Machine. This small robot roams the space in front of the projection plane only to greet and apologize to the viewers in six languages. The ultimately useless and domesticated robot (built, indeed, on the basis and software of a “state-of-the-art” household vacuum cleaner) nurtures the optimism and “normality” of the video’s survivors, endowing us with a rather innocuous post-apocalyptic feeling. (CCA)
This version of the work is documentation of the performance of the same name performed at the Israeli Center for Digital Art in the framework of the project, ’Hapzura.’
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