The installation The Trip is the first artistic collaboration between the two artists, both recent graduates of the Faculty of Fine Art VUT in Brno. The audio piece derives from an event in which an intensive physical act in the landscape poses the challenge of how to deliver such an experience to the viewer. The Trip refers symbolically to the trajectory and meeting of two bicyclists starting from opposite ends of Czech Republic. The journey turns out to be more important than the meeting itself. The artists decided to set off on bikes from Olomouc and Česká Lípa with the plan to meet in Dobruška, approximately midpoint between these two towns. The result of the journey are two sets of audio recordings. Jan Prošek attempted to capture the changing landscape that he passed through in his audio recordings. In the installation he ordered them successively based on the order of their origin. Through sound he creates the illusion of moving through space. Jan Krtička replaced the tourist's camera with a sound recorder and, like a tourist on a tour, captured a certain number of ephemeral audio fragments, recording his impressions of the locations which he would have photographed, had he taken the camera with him instead. Individual descriptions come from separate speakers that are suspended in a row on the wall, and presented in the same manner that photographs are typically presented.
Several levels of meaning are embedded in The Trip, including the installation, as well as the original action self. The basic element of The Trip is the physical experience of the body as it travels over the landscape, an exhausting trip of many hours. The artists were exposed to the elements, perceiving directly the transformation of the environment and at the same time, taking care to record the course of the travel, in so doing reflecting the environment and its processes. The installation is constructed and designed to be spatially exact; however the resulting aural space is determined randomly with the intermingling of 17 separate audio fragments.
Jan Prošek, (born 1977) is a conceptual artist and performer who in the long term has been exploring the phenomenon of the landscape, mainly the bodily experience which comes out of interaction with it. The basic elements of his work include the walk and a simple ritual gesture. In this way he attempts to form a relationship with the landscape and formulate the basic processes which take place between the human and the landscape.
Jan Krtička (*1979) inquires in his work about the border between object and installation, often focusing on the space and its material qualities. He is interested in designing the conditions for the viewer of an intensive experience drawn from the location encountered. Lately, he is interested in problems of documentation. He is looking for ways to encode and transfer information of the situation or process that took place, so he manipulates photographs from his portfolio or replaces them with a verbal description which he then presents as an audio recording.
The video installation Media of Transition by Jan Prošek in Grey Room is addressing the relationship between the genre of traditional painting and possibilities of digital tools for post production of moving image are offering for artist.
