Busacca Gallery

Photo Digital Manipulator, Fine Art Print By Photographer Helmut Grill: Signed and numbered photography number 3/5 Since 1991 I fully devote my time to the arts, leaving behind my previous profession as a “digital manipulator” of advertising visuals. Quickly understanding that a wide horizon inspires my work I started to explore different urban environments. Over the last 21 years I have learned a lot about my individual, conscious and subconscious approaches to values and emotions that influence my thinking. These conclusions about my inner priorities, threats to my ideals and anxieties have pushed me to search for ways to express the conflict of imminence and protection. It started with natural rubber and attempted to compress it between metal pieces. Ultimately the seemingly soft rubber would succeed over the “predominant” metal and altered its shape. From there I started to coat valuable, random or frightening items with liquid rubber to either eliminate the danger, change the meaning or protect the vulnerable. An online-based opportunity for visitors to remotely initiate a coating session marked my first step towards interactive art projects. My search continued on to photographic media choosing “almost” random images from the web. I then digitally enhanced them and put them into different environments, looking for controversy of beauty and war or harmony and destruction, adding an additional layer by partially “coating” the people’s skin with writings. The writings are subconscious without literal meaning or poetry. I try to channel possible thoughts of people in pictures on to their skin without deliberately editing the meaning. They symbolize a different awkward threat we have to deal with everyday in form of media and information overflow. At same time the visually appealing coat of letters rather wraps the individuals into my personal armour of words. My photographic exploration of invasion continued with digitally altering graphic relations in interpersonal situations, increasing or decreasing the size of the aggressor versus the defender. This work sometimes left me astonished by the fact of how much people trust in the power of images and how impossible scenarios can be, while people still think it truly happened. Still partially unsatisfied with only 2 dimensional solution of photography, I started to look into video installations, initially expressing my ideas in a simplistic/minimalist, but very meaningful way. This is how I came up with my project “Rocket Fish.” A little fish symbolizing men's everlasting strive to rise above the ordinary. The stubborn aim to achieve the seemingly impossible. Endless attempts without reason or eventually the only path to transcendence? www.rocket-fish.com/ The next project I called “The Refuge”. A concept based on the fascination of secrecy. The lack of people is part of creating the seclusion. Any reflection and correlation with humanity purely originates from the play with what has been left behind or the meaningful placement of elements seemingly added over the course of time. The “house” (home, hotel, refuge, ...) itself, neon signs, strange wild postings, drawings or graffiti and the environment are all “lit” intentionally in obscure ways to create the specific atmosphere I desire. Following this concept are the “sceneries”, which i´m working on at the moment. Virtual landscapes waiting for a discoverer. Above all it is the secrecy and the limitation of obvious information, which should  inspire to go for a journey into a mysterious world. Helmut Grill:

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion

An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. Though illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most people. Illusions may occur with any of the human senses, but visual illusions (optical illusions), are the most well-known and understood. The emphasis on visual illusions occurs because vision often dominates the other senses. For example, individuals watching a ventriloquist will perceive the voice is coming from the dummy since they are able to see the dummy mouth the words. Some illusions are based on general assumptions the brain makes during perception. These assumptions are made using organizational principles (e.g., Gestalt theory), an individual's capacity for depth perception and motion perception, and perceptual constancy. Other illusions occur because of biological sensory structures within the human body or conditions outside of the body within one’s physical environment.



The term illusion refers to a specific form of sensory distortion. Unlike a hallucination, which is a distortion in the absence of a stimulus, an illusion describes a misinterpretation of a true sensation. For example, hearing voices regardless of the environment would be a hallucination, whereas hearing voices in the sound of running water (or other auditory source) would be an illusion.



Mimes are known for a repertoire of illusions that are created by physical means. The mime artist creates an illusion of acting upon or being acted upon by an unseen object. These illusions exploit the audience's assumptions about the physical world. Well-known examples include "walls", "climbing stairs", "leaning", "descending ladders", and "pulling and pushing".







An optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that are deceptive or misleading. Therefore, the information gathered by the eye is processed by the brain to give, on the face of it, a percept that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source. A conventional assumption is that there are physiological illusions that occur naturally and cognitive illusions that can be demonstrated by specific visual tricks that say something more basic about how human perceptual systems work. The human brain constructs a world inside our head based on what it samples from the surrounding environment. However sometimes it tries to organise this information it thinks best while other times it fills in the gaps. This way in which our brain works is the basis of an illusion.