Janine Sack
Virtual Fear

Germany, 2002/06, video installation,
4 min 44 sec

Janine Sack is a visual artist based in Berlin. She graduated in visual communications at the HfbK in Hamburg and completed postgraduate studies at the Royal Art College in Stockholm. In 2003 she was awarded the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange, Dundee, and in 2004 took part in Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt artIT, Berlin.

Along with her individual artistic output, Janine Sack has been engaged in various collaborative practices. In 1992–93 she was involved in frauen-und-technik, a women-artists’ collective that used television and performance to discuss issues of feminism and media theory. She was also a founding member of -Innen, a group of four women working with ground-breaking multimedia techniques (1993–97). In 2006 she co-curated Revisiting Home at NGBK in Berlin, a project dealing with the notion of dwelling as an interface between the individual and society. www.janinesack.de

Central to Janine Sack´s work is a playful investigation into clichés of representation. Her earlier works were mainly concerned with notions of identity and gender, analyzing these in terms of their social construction and media representation. More recently her work has turned to deconstruction of media imagery and the uncovering of psychological subtexts within contemporary visual languages.

In Virtual Fear, one long camera-shot takes the viewer through a virtually constructed domestic environment. The labyrinthine building is strewn with loaded objects, there are models and wall-mounted images of tiny architectural spaces, mimicking the surrounding virtual environment and creating a circular reference to the constructed space. The slow, deliberate movement of the camera, the open doors and sudden sounds all combine to suggest something will happen. But the camera continues to move through the space: the suspense leads to no action or resolution. Virtual Fear is a 3-D animation that explores the spatial aspects of fear and suspense by means of the aesthetics of video games and thriller films.