“Easter Eggs”, 3’ 23”, 2003

Common traits have been part of my research: the artificiality of a process, the evident signs left to underline the ambiguity of communication, the virus of uncertainty, the necessary reflection on the appearances of imagery, a constantly temporary state.
The Easter Eggs video portrays people walking inside an exhibition and watching a video projection. These people are invisible: you can tell their presence only by their shadows on screen, as if they were standing in front of the projector. Real, flesh-and-bone visitors that will attend the installation and pass by the screen will project their own shadows on it, side by side with virtual visitors.
The shadows of these virtual visitors should appear and behave like people at an exhibition. By their silhouette you may recognize some typical characters: collectors, students, artists, journalists. They walk, stop, watch the video on the screen and talk to each other. They hardly care when some other shadows occasionally commit some violent acts - they fight, one is killed.

A part of the background video shows e-eggs, useless but sometimes intriguing programs (containing messages, graphic or sound effects) made by software developers of well-known computer programs to show off their ability and creativity. These e-eggs are hidden inside commercial software, and they can be launched only by typing some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes.
Other parts the background video show abnormal and dramatic excerpts from the popular ‘The Sims’ videogame. Virtual visitors together with real visitors will watch this videogame that just aims to simulate real life. Ironically, the scenes extracted from the Sims quickly become grotesque and absurd, far from real life.

Virtual models become as true as the real ones; real and virtual worlds meet in a third element - the shadow. The video intends to deceive our perceptive capabilities and question the idea of identity.

Debora Hirsch