movie 3,6 Mb

..."Camera Silens consists of a massive,sober-looking eight-ton box representing a room within a room, a Kunstkammer (or curiosity cabinet) containing no wonders and curiosities but those the visitors themselves expierence inside it. The anti-archive, the empty storeroom that drastically reverses the much debated theme of over-stimulation in the world of audio-visual media, refers all those who enter it back to a perception of self."... from "Deep Storage" by Stephan Iglhaut

 

..."Rob Moonen, in collaboration with Olaf Arndt: Camera Silens, 1994.

Architecture and consciousness under the conditions of sensory deprivation.
600 x 600 x 540 cm., steel, wood, acoustic insulation material, a chair, an observation camera, a monitor and light bulbs.
A space that is constructed in such a way that a person in this space will receive no form of sensory stimulus whatsoever or change of stimulus. There is no sound and no smell. The space is a monochrome white colour, and is lit at a constant level.
Only the sounds of the individual’s body, of breathing, swallowing, the beat of the heart and the streaming of the blood, can be heard in this acoustic vacuum. Nothing that is emitted, will reverberate. This space is dead and deadens.
Human senses primarily perceive changes in the environment. Their nourishment consists of a constant succession of changes. The functions of human life, in the sense of the organism’s self-direction and development, are nourished by the sensory experience of these kinds of changes in the environment.
The individual loses himself completely in the Camera Silens. The subject becomes an object, becomes a thing.
It is the most radical form of isolation.
Starving the senses, the space achieves absolute domination of its inhabitant. Reprisal, the potential to take arms against another person or the environment, vanishes.
Complete control. Everything remains the same forever, and duration is the assassin.
The mind is isolated from the body, is killed in its own way.
By the way, spaces such as these also functioned as experimental prisons and included Stammheim. Here, the Rote Armee Faktion members were held and driven mad. Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Holger Meins…
Merged with the absolute zero of existence, where the end of the North Pole is like a tropical paradise…
Deeply frozen in a survival capsule, in America, alongside Walt Disney’s head, and waiting for a resurrection, but without the hope of a cure later, ever, when science is able and allowed to do everything…"... from :"with the face in the mud" by H. van Boxtel