The Flux of Moments

Reading the Photographs and Installations of Tone Myskja

by Anne Karin Jortveit

You may have experienced a sudden sadness in front of a photograph - the sadness of not knowing what happened before or after. Instantaneous still images keep you at  a distance in time and space, and you may feel alienated if there is nothing that happens to connect you to the scene depicted. You might expect to experience these same feelings in front of  the digitised photographs and repetitive video sequences in the art of Tone Myskja, but to enter one of her installations is to experience a difference.
For her 10x98 European Commision, Myskja has chosen to work with a vast historical span, juxtaposing photographic images of stone and water, linking a Yorkshire Landscape and a Norwegian landscape to a history of the Viking settlers of the Norwegian past.

She lets images of natural objects and light transform themselves into a digital reality, representing an imaginary site where past and present come into contact. In this realm, differences and similarities among time, space and language come into question.

Myskja´s installations play with the effects of light, like reflections on water and on stone, which dissolve any fixed notion of positive and negative space. The light is both solid and immaterial; a representation of both internal and external space; a state of mind and a visual perception. It is not a choice between dichotomies, or an emphasis on dissimilarities, but rather an incorporation of possible perceptual viewpoints. You are forced into an omnipresent moment because it contains its own past, present and future, intertwined in spatial understanding of meaning.

Through a poetic praxis of estrangement and transformation, familiar objects and terms are moved into new positions and assume new meanings, as evident in the dal-dale connection. Myskja acts as a reverse archaeologist, letting new layers of meaning come into existence, rather than searching for origins.
In the past, her installations have focused not only on photographs, drawings and video, but on the interactions of two-dimensional images and three-dimensional space. The conventional screen takes on a sculptural form, and independent sound collages infiltrate the scene. Myskja manages to create complex situations that are externally simple, allowing the audience to assume their role as perceiving bodies, rather than passive recipients. The body is thus challenged, as the dominant perspective of the eye is minimized: on a glossy floor surface, you se reflections caused by a videoprojection; when a video is projected from the ceiling and onto a soft floor area, you may inhabit the work with weight of your body, and the movement of your feet will alter and distort the images.

By concentrating on distinct, but almost banal events - an arm in movement, or a sordid form, like limestone, seen through shimmering layers of light - Myskja´s work is open to infinite readings. The multi-layered image is laid bare to a  participatory audience, a group of people who bring with them their own histories to create a meeting between bodies. Paradoxically, however, Myskja denies a biographical reading of her work, as she reveals nothing of her own emotions. The again, to quote T.S. Eliot, poetry is not about emotions, it is about running away from emotions.

For the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, our under standing of the world is based on our understanding of our own body. The body and the world are inextricably linked with each other. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not in space or in time, it inhabits space and time. perception, in this line of philosophy, is an embodied perception; it is always directed towards something. This intentionality is taken to its logical extreme in Myskja´s exploration of the manipulated image.

In Myskja´s work, as in Merleau-Ponty´s thinking, the borderline between body and nature is blurred. Body and nature merge, each becoming a metaphor for the other. A computermanipulated image of the surface of water may at the same time be a human skin moving under a play of light. These different rythms take you beyond the simulated surface of yet other surfaces; your perception of the world around you acts upon your reflections and feelings. And, in continuous loops, images remains perpetually in the present, thus expanding the moment into a pulsation of various movements.

In the process of working and reworking her images, the computer inhabits a human role. it is central, but never assumes superiority. Myskja´s work is not merely the product of the wonderful potential of technology. In the end, the digital image remains beneath the surface. Rather, the emphasis is on how to visualise different ways of being, through the possibilities offered by the computer. Myskja´s work presents a perceptual experience that is not, finally, constituted, but open for further exploration, both within its framework and in a meeting with its audience.