Infrared Room 2004

Carsten Holler's "Infrared Room" is, well, an infrared room. The artist has used what looks like a cool, blue palette, to record a figure throwing a ball. I can imagine Holler thinking: How can I convey the sense of touch, and action, through light? It looks as though the subject is performing an action as the projection repeats the process in a sequence of frames. It makes me think about Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies. The use of infrared light gives the work a kind of ghostly, ethereal feel, as if we are watching an action take place in another dimension. Like other process-based artists, Holler is interested in how we perceive reality. In his hands, art is not just an object, but an experiment and experience. Holler invites us to question our assumptions about what we see and how we see it, and to embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty of the world around us.