text for CENTRAL PARK

However stereotyped, this quotation from one of my Danish guidebooks may be, it is in many ways descriptive of Morten Schjødt's internet project "Central Park". Using a snapshot of Central Park as the opening image to ten video sequences, Schjødt focuses on two themes which are reflected upon in each of the individual videos and their accompanying texts: the boundary between nature and culture and between body and mind.

Naming his internet project "Central Park", Schjødt suggests that the opening image is not only the central image in a series of images to come but a place for opportunities and investigation - an amusement park for the internet user looking for still new links. Both in the wood bordering on the city, in the city skyline bordering on the sky and in the sky itself, links to video sequences are hidden waiting to be unveiled.

By uniting nature, civilization and Heaven in one image and letting the internet user penetrate through them, one might say that Schjødt attempts to deconstruct the conventional representation of reality in the Western world and present a more differentiated image of human existence in this very reality.

This deconstruction is carried on in the ten videos which in different ways relate to the question of human existence. Regarding breathing as the basic condition for all existence, Schjødt uses the symbol of breath as a starting point for all videos. Presented with different manners of breathing throughout the videos, it slowly becomes clear to the spectator that breathing is not only a reflection of our psysical and mental state, and thereby our surrounding environment, but a method to transcend reality as we normally know it.

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