Fondazione Prada - ‘Synchro System’,Carsten Höller
Among the most interesting artists on the international scene, beginning in the 1990s Carsten Höller (Brussels, 1961) helped bring artistic production closer to reality, stirring up unusual and surprising reactions in those who view his artworks. Höller’s work is aimed at individuating new possibilities for perceiving existence through a method of rigorous investigation similar to scientific research. The sensorial mechanisms that the artist realizes recall, from a formal point of view, laboratory structures in which the viewing public is the object of experimentation.
The project entitled Synchro System, designed by Höller for Fondazione Prada’s spaces, consists in the realization of a ‘village of possibility’ composed of psychophysical stimuli and interactive tools. Within a labyrinthine, sensorial route, the viewer faces progressive situations of altered perception caused by intermittent lights, devices that affect corporeal sensations, dark and disorienting spaces, and environments that provoke a hallucinatory effect. The project overturns individual sensibilities by estrangement of the real, and the loss of the natural dimension is one of the strategies the artist utilizes in order to test his subjects, incurring a state of physical and psychological disorientation.
The title refers to the synchronization between viewer and artwork, between human beings and ‘machine effects’: like tools, these systems have an operational function that achieves results only when working in synchronicity.
‘Synchro System’ is part of Fondazione Prada’s permanent collection, exhibiting in Milan.