...something in the air. A figure of Visual Distance and certain other Virtues 
 
'I dream of a mountain with no summit.' Doug Aitken. Dreams. Edited by Francesco Bonami and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1999, 12. 
 
'It is the effects that bodies have upon one another which come to constitute the photographic image or indeed make the child… Bodies are continually affecting each other and in so doing, composing, recomposing and decomposing a variety of relations…perhaps it is not so difficult to accept that a body is of all times.' Yve Lomax, 'The Photograph and les temps' Writing the Image, 2000, 121. 
 
Tempest in a teacup. The captured image and performativity 
 
The modus of Liisa Lounila's work is the captured image. The type of image she processes describes her way of thinking and working: to pluck a single event as an object of observation. We live continuously surrounded by images and vulnerable to their effects. Lounila has noticed both the effect of the situation and the possibility to react to it. It is important to stop the flow of images and focus on the possibilities of a single image. In the way Lounila works, it is interesting how the image is brought back to motion: how things are made to happen. The captured frame turns out to be not just a narrow segment. It creates circles and chains of events around itself. It opens up a new horizon around it.Tempest in a teacup. 
 
Lounila often reconstructs the image she is observing. She gives a single image the intensity of a whole scene. Likewise she can at first weaken the image, as part of her desire to reveal the visual structure of the image to the viewer. The captured frame is not just a snatching or a theft. Lounila varies its different possibilities. Sometimes it can be an old-fashioned still picture - a situation recorded during a film shoot. It can also be a frame capture: a frame directly chosen from the film material. The captured frame can be filmed with a camera straight from the monitor. In addition to the subjects she films, Lounila chooses subjects from different sources: newspapers, movies, television and the Internet. Lounila has a clear interest in the different methods and media for constructing an image. She has adapted the role of an inventor: the media are not pre-existing, but each work must wait for its own suitable solution. The toolbox ranges from the low tech - cameras and film equipment from past decades - to modern digital image processing. 
 
Lounila's interest in a single moment and bringing it to life is connected to another dimension in her way of working: performativity, understood as the process approach to making art. In the background of Lounila's photographs, paintings and film- and video-installations we find performance as a perceived site, where one can investigate concealed or dissimulated conventions. In the context of work based on the video- and media-installations by the American Gary Hill, performance and performativity have been described as follows: "Performative utterances can only do their work in the specific contexts that call them forth: performative language is always site/situation-specific and concrete." Here I approach Lounila’s work through these contexts of performative utterances. 
 
The recyclability of the photograph behind the images 
 
Susan Sontag has noted that photography doesn't simply reproduce reality but also recycles it. By presenting photos in new contexts they can say different things and serve very different purposes. She thinks of it as a key procedure in modern society. The photographer has been seen to perform two different roles: as an individual eye and an objective recorder. Through these roles the difference between art photography and documentary photography is created. Yet behind both ways of picturing is the thought of the camera as a medium to make perceptions, and the world as material lying in front of it, to be used. When looking at photography, the different roles of the photographer walk more or less hand in hand with each other. As we observe Lounila's way of using photography through these concepts, she makes an interesting counter-movement in her work. She is interested in the so-called neutral or news picture, which we trust as evidence of reality. Her relationship to the image has changed into an interest in methods of picturing and the different genres of images and their processing. For Lounila, documentary photography itself has become an object to be photographed in her individual style. This happens, for instance, in Scene Missing, the series of photographs that trace crime scene photography. It also happens in the lightboxes with transparencies of road landscapes, which she has shot from movies played on a TV screen, or in her new aerial-catastrophe paintings. At the same time, she leaves in hints of the photograph’s authenticity or, more probably, the lack of authenticity: reflections from the TV screen, the dot-matrix surface of the image, the resolution lines of the TV transmission or distortions caused by the angle of the picture. 
 
Übermut tut selten gut 
 
There are already similarities to be seen in the work Lounila has made up to now. In the pair of paintings called Amy and Folker, we see a suggestion of the previous Übermut series. The subject of the paintings is a restricted scene: a single person against an anonymous blank background. In the Amy and Folker paintings, people are portrayed jumping and falling. In the previous Übermut paintings we saw a different situation, or maybe an ensuing situation: people lying dead in a blank space, like emptied bodies or shells, unexplained, with only the date to tell what has happened. We have become used to a similar "framing" of the presentation in crime and accident photography. 
 
Lounila explains her view of the term Übermut as it applies to the paintings. She feels that it can be used to describe the circumstances in which people who are "hypersensitive to unusual stages of excitement" can find themselves. In such situations the flow of events can end tragically or unpredictably. In the background of this series of paintings, Lounila also installed a type of tableau vivant performance. During the performance she lay motionless on a staircase in the site’s active party area: she wore a white baby doll-dress, a broken glass in her hand and blood under her head. The alarm center had been warned about the performance, but this didn't stop the party guests from calling the Finnish emergency number. The documentation of the event provided the line of thought for the series of paintings where Lounila's friends in their turn would play dead. 
 
The aerial-catastrophe subjects represent the way we become accustomed to looking at the past, the way we face these disasters in the flow of the news. We are used to seeing them as part of the imagery of modern art as well. In order to move in performance-like works from one medium to another and create the desired impression, Lounila needs an arranged situation. The aim of the paintings is not to be a portrait of the person in the picture, but to record the performance that the picture-genre suggests, along with a new interpretation. The nature of the visual elements in Lounila's works is two-way: they simultaneously create and deconstruct an illusion. By doing so, the works reveal a change that has to do with the way images are produced and received nowadays: the way of constructing the visual look of the images so that they already have built into them the challenge of various interpretations. 
 
The aviation accidents of the last century 
 
Behind the Hindenburg, Challenger and Concorde paintings is Lounila's interest in those events of aviation history where the causes have not been entirely solved. There are various competing theories and views of the causes of these accidents. The events continue to produce new attempts to solve them even years after they have passed. In Lounila's case one can believe that the subjects and approaches to the events were 'kuumottavia' - a Finnish slang word meaning something that is compelling yet somehow untrustworthy. Lounila has spent years collecting this kind of material about various events. 
 
Lounila has made the aerial-catastrophe paintings with plastic glitter. The paintings glow in the tones of the gray scale, suggesting childlike glitter-images. The shiny silver glow of the paintings reminds us for a moment of the actuality of the historical subjects. Lounila is interested in the process of creating meanings through images: the transfer of an image into a symbol of an event, in which the meaning can change unpredictably. The method describes the excitement related to the events: the nearly attained success of promised utopias, and the collapse following this promise. Lounila presents her subjects without an evaluating interpretation or any horror-struck sensationalism. In the paintings, both intensity and emptiness are present - both the necessary historical closeness and the necessary historical distance. 
 
Slices of time in a new dimension 
 
"Shooting a music video with Barry White in non-gravitational space." To me, this Johan Grimonprez line crystallizes the atmosphere of Lounila's video installations POPCORN (2001) and Flirt (2002). Grimonprez became known as an artist with his documentary about plane hijackers. 
 
Lounila tells about the shooting technique for POPCORN, a technique she developed together with her colleague Henri Tani: "I used a camera I built myself from cardboard. It was 18 m long and surrounds the subject that I film. It simultaneously exposes 528 frames on 35mm film. The technique is also known under the names time-slice, temps mort, virtual camera, timetrack and multicam. The camera functions by picturing the subject simultaneously from all directions with many separate cameras. When these pictures, each taken from a slightly different angle, are joined together as a film, it creates the illusion of movement around an unmoving subject. The effect the technique creates is familiar to us from music videos of recent years and from movies. The material from one take can bring you about 35 seconds of moving image." 
 
In Lounila's film installation, the presentation of one moment through 360 degrees of images creates a feeling of weightlessness. The method gives a tingling feeling to the viewer: to see and yet at the same time not to be aware how it is possible to see that way. Seeing involves entering the event and being entwined in the center of the event. The ellipse form of a camera that is the size of a room includes an unintentional rocking impression of movement: this creates the continuity of movement characteristic of the takes. The projection of the work may be seen from two directionsin the exhibition space. 
 
The concept of time in these works is different from the linear concept of time as we generally perceive it. Photography connects with the thought of the frozen moment, "the decisive moment" (Henri Cartier-Bresson), which Lounila has taken as a starting point for her work as she ventures between photography and film. The way a photograph freezes a moment has been considered an idée fixe in photography. In Lounila's film works, the sense of time recalls our experience watching sports competitions, where the action is slowed or stopped for the final decisive moments of play or activity. The slice of time is separated from the continuity of time and is given a new duration. In Lounila's work it is also given a new dimension in space. 
 
The floating atmosphere of the works is created when the captured time-slice is allowed to move again. The camera tracks are assembled from the material that the Evil camera and its successors have produced. In post production the simultaneous exposures are animated one after another, and the images unsuitable for the movement series are removed. Both works had ten takes. Characteristically the event retains the ambivalence between the event itself and its visual restatement. The work is a paradox. By making the frozen moment longer and creating a new entirety out of it, it seems to record the very essence of the moment. In the work, the human bodies and their tracks of movement hang between the transitory and the monumental. The works create a series of previously unseen traces, or impressions, that have not been visible even in the shoots. This sense of time is based on the handling of the event as a specific site, which is precisely the site of the work. 
 
The ultimate evil is released 
 
POPCORN and Flirt differ from each other not only in the variation of the subject matter and the usage of different film stock (black-and-white as opposed to color), but also in how the narrator and the music are being used as parts of the structure of the work. "In POPCORN," Lounila states, "I wanted to picture the memory of a certain event just the way it was, without a special narrator or point of view." She did not, however, give up the narrator completely. As an introduction to the piece we hear a voice trailer. The low male voice is familiar to us from the trailers of action movies. The start gives a kind of instruction guide for the piece. It offers us a perceptual enabler: "Even if you know the law, forget the rules. Never get involved. Some people will go to any extremes for a taste of victory, at any price. Flirting with greatness, if all else fails. No question about losing the battle. And when both sides start taking casualties, all hell is breaking loose. The ultimate evil is released." 
 
In Flirt, six different actors fight each other in pairs. The combinations vary so that one actor from the previous scene always remains for the next scene. The video installation, which plays as a loopp, doesn't have an actual starting or ending point. Lounila says the story is about an "unpredictable situation, which starts accelerating." The perception of the situation also depends on when the viewer comes to watch the life-sized characters fighting. 
 
The role of music: paraphrase and counterpoint 
 
The music in POPCORN functions as a paraphrase of the subject of the movie. It is somehow timeless and familiar, though it combines these qualities with an unrecognizable element. The piece (by Nu Science) is called "E.T. Phone Home" - a name that implies the way SciFi movies transfer our utopian sense of communion or longing onto strange places, adventures and creatures. The music gives the ensuing scenes a sense of continuity. A surprising lightness and timelessness accompanies the melancholy foundation of POPCORN. It is like the mental image of a visit to a decades-old amusement park, seen only in the Sunday of your imagination. In the music composed for Flirt, Lounila is looking for an atmosphere quite opposite to POPCORN’s atmosphere: "The meaning is that the music has a lot of cracks in it, that it is disturbing, unnerving, yet slightly melodic." The music creates a counterpoint to the picture-telling, which proceeds as a decelerating, circulating movement from one scene to another. The viewing experience is intentionally destabilized and so the viewer becomes aware of her position as part of the development of the situation. 
 
Relative distance and some final short cuts 
 
It is as if Lounila would want to show in all possible ways that the image is not here in any simple sense. It is not arrested, but in constant movement. The image only appears to be attainable in front of our eyes. It should be perceived as part of a plan, a matrix. At the same time, just as the viewer starts to perceive the entirety or the events leading to the image, Lounila dodges away - perhaps to produce a sequel to the event as a new work. The performative place that Lounila presents is her work in the field of unpredictable events, accidents and cultural competition. Lounila registers the supposed neutrality of the image in her own special way. Through the threatening and tingling subjects she makes us pay attention to the methods of visual presentation and the meanings that are built into the methods in advance. With her work she shakes and recodes those meanings. She makes use of the narrative nature of images by denying it. She has presented crime scenes without the crime, a film without a scene, arranged accidents. This denial, the absence of the signifier in the sign, does not cause its collapse, but forces it to be constructed again. The denial awakens the ability to imagine in the viewer. The composition of the captured images falls apart and comes together to form new horizons of meaning.

- Leevi Haapala