Coopparatus

WHAT

Coopparatus is an anamorphic, rotating installation in which four images can assemble. At its center is a cubic image body made of 144 glass strips, enclosed in a glass hood.

Distributed across the strips are four shattered images. The fragments are arranged in central perspective so that after each 90° rotation of the installation a different image becomes visible. They appear especially clearly when one eye is closed. In the intermediate positions, the images break apart into a cloud of fragments.

The drive unit consists of a turntable with a geared motor. The indexing table moves stepwise: after each 90° step, the mechanism decelerates gently, pauses briefly, and then begins to rotate slowly again.

Four depictions of hands can be seen, with each pair of opposing images occupying the same silhouette: in one, a hand holds various picked mushrooms; opposite, the hand itself becomes a nutrient ground and is overgrown by bracket fungi. In another, the hand holds an amethyst; opposite, the hand is petrified and set with garnets.

HOW

Coopparatus is not merely an apparatus for bringing images forth. Through the use of mechanical, material, craft-based, and perspectival techniques, the installation expands the immediate question “WHAT do I see?” into another: because the images are accessible only through active perspectival regulation, “HOW do I see the images?” emerges. Ordinary image-viewing is shifted by the technical set-up so that the conditions of seeing move into focus. Coopparatus brings the operation behind representation to the foreground. Seeing becomes visible as a process, not as a neutral window.

The installation thus functions as an apparatus that triggers the observation of observation. Its operation becomes intelligible only insofar as a viewer includes their own seeing in the process. Any description of Coopparatus presupposes an observer—someone who refers their own observing back to itself. The installation is designed so that this self-reference becomes a functional condition: the images appear as images only when a specific viewing position is sought out, occupied, and if necessary corrected. The boundary between work and viewing becomes unstable.

From certain angles, four images can be recognized; in each case, two images are positioned opposite one another and—like the doubled letters in the title—fill exactly the same area. This turning back onto a reverse side also appears thematically in the image pairs. Hands that seem to “hold nature” are, on their reverse sides, overgrown and mineralized as “nature.” Where one side distinguishes nature and human, the other reveals this distinction as a human constructive act that turns into its opposite and cancels itself. The boundary between “nature” and “human” appears not as an inherent property of things, but as a placement made by the gaze.

The work touches on a wide range of thematic fields. Beyond the perception of visual art, the installation points more generally to seeing through technical devices—a defining feature of observation processes in industrialized and digitized societies. Apparatuses—including the eye— isolate and stabilize visibility by setting certain conditions and excluding others.

Coopparatus points to these apparatus-based prerequisites of seeing by making the device itself an object of perception: the images appear only from specific angles, more clearly with one eye closed, and otherwise collapse into a cloud of fragments. Whoever finds the figure simultaneously experiences what must remain excluded on the reverse side for it to appear. The conditions of seeing thus move into the foreground, and with them the question of how this seeing comes about: Seeing is non-seeing.