The exhibition examines the prototypical forms of aesthetic experience: intends to confront the visitor with an elementary situation of image, sound and object perception where the artwork is not presenting itself as a cultural work of art, instead appears as a natural-geological-archaeological fossil or event.
For this purpose, the artists create a complex, interactive installation that reacts to the spatial position of the visitor, with the use of the instruments of visual arts and contemporary music. Human cognition continuously wants to incorporate everything that it recognizes as pre-image or pre-history, since it tries to interpret the prior from the perspective of the upcoming.
The spaces of PROTO strive to aesthetically formulate this tension, for as hybrids between nature and culture they refer to an unexposable, foreign prehistory or beginning, to a xeno-archaicum that becomes only a fragment because no coherent history of origin can be fabricated out of it.
The installation, building on complex audiovisual experiences, is set in two rooms that evoke the atmosphere and materiality of archaeological and ritual sites. This effect is increased by the use of clay as the primal artistic material, important from the perspective of the experience of time as well: during the exhibition, one of PROTO’s spaces provides us with the opportunity to witness the natural dehydration of a clay surface covered with water.
Thus the interplay of matter and time becomes an equal non-human “partner” to the artists and visitors in the formation of the aesthetic experience, as it also appears acoustically in the context of the interactive musical compositions.