Post by Alexander Hahn

«Sleep – a second’s glance» was commissioned in 1999 by the Schweizerische Graphische Gesellschaft as its annual members’ edition (Jahresgabe) for 125 members. Instead of making 125 identical prints, I created 25 stills for a one-second 3D computer animation. Each still was printed in an edition of five; a CD with the animation made the complete sequence visible. The scene unfolds in a virtual bath architecture, partly inspired by a visit to the thermal baths of Vals. At the edge of the pool, a male figure lies motionless, supine, while a seated woman draws back her right leg. Across the one-second animation, almost nothing happens, yet the water level rises, the steam shifts, and a change of the point of view disturbs the suspended scene. The reclining figure has an earlier source in a dream from around 1978, in which I flew above the fields of an agrarian landscape (see the related watercolor collage from that time, «Ich träum vom Ackerland»). It also recalls Andrea Mantegna’s Cristo morto: an exposed, vulnerable body, here displaced into a secular, virtual bath. To this day, my use of 3D computer graphics isn't primarily directed toward realism. I'm interested in texture mapping as a mnemonic procedure: projecting images from disparate places, times and earlier works onto virtual architecture.  In «Sleep - a second's glance», the bath becomes a memory palace assembled from displaced fragments. Brick walls derive from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the water from a video documenting a scientific ripple-tank experiment. These textures do not simply decorate the virtual space. They allow places, images and bodies to return — as light is reborn, or resurrected, in memory and dream. #schweizerischegraphischegesellschaft #jahresgaben #digitalart #3dcomputergraphics #texturemapping #memorypalace #printmaking #mantegna #thermevals #pergamonmuseum