Made in ’Eaven by Mark Leckey

The installation that I found very interesting is called “Made in ‘Eaven,” and it was created by artist named Mark Leckey.  It is a short piece of video, the length of it is around three or four minutes. It starts very abruptly and later on becomes very slow and smooth. In the beginning camera shakes a little and it creates a feeling that it was shot handheld. After that it starts moving and it is very stable as if the camera is on the dolly or on a very good stabilizer. Viewer of this piece sees just a white room with two doors, one window and one very suspicious looking sculpture of what it seems like a bunny. The camera gets closer and closer to the bunny but the interesting thing is that the bunny is made of completely reflective surface and still we don’t see the camera coming closer. The camera starts revolving around this bunny and there is a moment when it comes closer to the presumable head of a bunny and it feels strange and bizarre. The wicked feeling occurs because we are looking straight into the bunny’s head but we don’t see eyes or nose or any other features. As the camera comes closer we see the reflection or a part of a room that is always behind the camera. And, it continues revolving in a close up for a minute and as it dollies out we see a window and what is outside of the room. As the camera gets further from the bunny we see two doors and the body of the bunny. In the middle of the video, the camera gets back to its first position where it started and bizarre feeling happens again because the head of a bunny reflects two red pillar looking parts of a room and they are reflected exactly on the part of bunny’s head where eyes are supposed to be.

However, the most interesting thing about the art piece is that the video  looks as CGI rendering and it probably is because the camera is two fluid and there is no other way how the artist could get rid of the reflections on a bunny’s surface. Although, the way this art piece is shown is very not contemporary or binary. It was transferred on 16mm film and it is projected to a wall from an old projector that loops the video. In the beginning, I personally did not realize that it was a computer generated video because it was projected from a film. My initial thought was a wonder of how they made the camera flow so smoothly. Also, watching it from a distance helped to seal the illusion that it was real. However then the bunny’s head moment came in on a screen and it was too smooth and with no reflection of the camera. Around that time the realization came that it was created on a computer. In close inspection though it was still hard to distinguish because the room itself looks very natural and the lighting is very real.

Made in ’Eaven by Mark Leckey