Jiri Cernicky’s work Tower Block, ABS Video, 2006, opens with a frontal view of a gray gray, crowded apartment building; its multiple windows fill the entire frame, and are distinguished by no decorative or personal details. Gradually, different texts begin emerging with increasing speed from the windows of various apartments; detached, fragmented and not truly legible, they seem to acquire a living, breathing presence.
This work was created by positioning microphones in front of different doors in the building, and recording the random conversations emanating from within the apartments. Just as the real/architectural sphere represented by the building façade is spread out before the viewer’s gaze, so the various human spheres that inhabit it are spread out by means of the words and lines that erupt out of the apartments. Yet the texts – which function like mental subtitles that reveal the harsh banality of everyday life – are unimportant to the point of being simultaneously surprising, disappointing and fascinating. The seemingly private mental space exposed in this work is gradually revealed to be a public, dialogic sphere occupied by multiple participants, and devoid of any personal attributes. The everyday reality captured in this work is characterized by no particular contents or identifying details. Instead, it uncovers a Le Corbusier-style living machine, and makes audible the creaking of the complex mechanisms that sustain it.
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