Hugo Roelandt

In collaboration with Greet Verlinden, Marc Holthof & Bob Van Aert

"From action / performance to the study of MOVEMENT: the videoregistration of mechanical 'auto mobile' objects (toy cars) who chose their own movement and randomly form a colour-composition for the public." - Hugo Roelandt

•  Marchandise, Montevideo, Antwerp, April '83

•  Ex, Brussels, May '83

•  Parkeren in De Singel, De Singel, Antwerp, August '85

Whereas the presence of the performer was still suggested in some indirect way in the Post Performance Projects, the performer becomes totally absent in the Auto Matic Art Project (A.M.A.P.). Inside a square container, Roelandt makes toy cars of different colours drive around autonomously. When they collide, they automatically move in a different direction. Above the container hangs a video camera that records the action and projects it live. Roelandt saw the project as an investigation of art as an autonomous process, or “a performance on autopilot”. The project was performed at multiple locations including Montevideo, a radical alternative art space in Antwerp that Hugo Roelandt co-founded with Annie Gentils.

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A.M.A.P. is a mobile composition in which the role of the different objects is stressed. A given quantity of colour-elements – framed in glass – moves in contrast to the background. A video-camera registers the resulting variations in colour and the relation with the movement which becomes visible underneath. Three colour-elements are equally represented but they chose their own rhythm and place and so form a composition that is projected on a videoscreen. Movement is created by an electro-chemical reaction. The elements themselves define the colouring. Where the electro-chemical reaction ends, the order is fixed. The static square in which the elements evolve contrasts with the colour-dynamics in it. The elements and their accidental combination don’t carry any symbolic meaning but simply accentuate the auto-mechanical development of the composition. ‘Auto’ refers here – like in ‘autodidact’ – to ‘self’, ‘self propelling’. A.M.A.P. refuses the imposed and fixed patterns of artistic products. It questions the meaning of an art that wants to represent something.

(Abstracts from Hugo Roelandt: Let's Expand The Sky, red. Mark Holthof, Occasional Papers, London, 2016)