Vertigo forms a counterpoint to the exhibition on early modern fireworks, with which it shares the space of the Archdiocesan Museum. The installation works with transience, light and sound as essential components of the fireworks experience. Their presentation within the museum’s interior can offer an alternative to disfigure the ecological and hygienic burdens that are nowadays associated with these increasingly popular attractions. Fireworks are a controversial topic in contemporary celebration culture. At the same time, we are experiencing the emergence of a multiple generation of technical instruments that move the games of light and sound to any corner of cities and peripheries. Fireworks at the Museum offers an intimate turn in this kind of spectacle – rather than a demonstration of power and exuberance, it offers an individual contemplation in an environment of technological-spiritual scenography.
Vertigo is a condition where sensory overload makes it impossible to focus the senses on a specific point in space. It is one of the phenomena of the physiognomy of sight that John Evangelista Purkyně explored in his work. Among other things, his experiments concern morphological formations perceived in the liminal and subjective regions of visuality. The results of these experiments were then interpreted by Purkyně as “visual opinion”. The Vertigo installation is, in a way, a calibration paterno of visual opinion, pulsating like fiery patterns amplifying otherwise subliminal perceptions.
In the past, fires were used during festivals to demonstrate personal and spiritual mysteries. Light has in many ways replaced fire as its essential, directed and liminal quality superior to the physical forms of visible things. The situation in the dome of the medieval tower testifies to the objecthood of seeing by means of a vibrating continuum that does not receive a fixed shape and affects perception as a composed spectacle or as a deconstruction of what is seen.
