Matthias Hederer, “Close Contact”

The eye of a closed circuit television camera catches glimpses of a person gesturing across its field of vision, interrupting the surveillance of the room. The person gets intimately close to the camera, allowing it a near, but nevertheless anonymous, look.

“The viewer looks through the eye of a cctv-camera, looks from above into a room with no recognizable dimensions. An anonymous person enters the scenery.

Now the space is the room.

Although part of the surveillance, the viewer must remain passive to the activity of the unknown person, who is trying to get in contact, who is trying to start communication.” – Matthias Hederer

Matthias Hederer has lived and worked in Bruxelles, Belgium, Flensburg, Nuremberg, Karlsruhe, and Berlin, Germany. He studied Media Arts at HfG-Karlsruhe from 1997 to 2003. Hederer works mostly with video and photography, combining both within installations. Since 2001, he has worked with Iris Holstein as IRIS-A-MAZ. His main focus is on botanic phenomenon in urban spaces. More info at http://www.iris-a-maz.de

About this series:
The Interior—that which lies between, the domestic, the inner life, the indoors, the inland country, a closed circuit, the inner sanctum…

In Canada, the Interior refers to the hinterland, sparsely populated resource-rich lands stretching out to the north of distant southern cities, typically described by outsiders as a ‘frontier’. Despite a southern population huddling mostly along the Canada-U.S. border, the soul of Canada is often said to be its north. With this loosely in mind, I put out an open call for submissions for videos that responded to 'the Interior.' Despite the subtle reference to Canadian geography, I wasn’t looking for fist-pumping Canadian nationalism.

In this series, six artists explore the Interior as an idea, a vast terra incognita stretching out across the land, the body, and the mind, a swath of territory defined apart, but intrinsic to the whole. Touching on both the literal and the poetic, these videos take me inwards.
Mark Prier.