Sergiy Petlyuk / / Сергій Петлюк

I can't get out of here

2021

Multimedia installation
(metal constructions, LED panels, programming) 220 x 150 x 50 cm

 

The aesthetics of LED text-streaming panels refer, on the one hand, to outdoor advertising with its obsessive visual pressure and, on the other hand, to news-streaming technologies in which the often continuous flow of information is reflected in a running text line. But unlike advertising or news, the text in this work carries no additional message other than one simple bilingual expression: "I CAN'T GET OUT OF HERE". This information moves along a conditional, closed curve trajectory and does not change. The text infinitely repeats and rerepeats itself as if pointing out the problem of being trapped or rather self-trapped in a digital space from which it cannot escape, thus signalizing the impasse of its own situation.

In the context of mankind's global transition to the digital age, in which the boundaries between the real and the digital world are becoming increasingly blurred, in which the digital world is gradually influencing the real world, and in which it is more and more difficult to get out of the digitital and return to reality, the expression «I can’t get out of here» takes on alarmingly ironic colours.