Notes on the work of Thomas Roppelt

The lines produced through the motion of scanning via NDSL illuminate a lightless room, underscore its characteristics. This scanning motion is not only a component in a structural emphasis, although it is an aspect of that which might, in regard to the space, be termed structural. Yet due to the fact that the emphatically structural only emerges as a component in the course of the procedural, the scanning motion adds a perceptual component. The given is made more clear, and changes; laser light brings about an analytical dissection and stages a re-construction.

In what does the sense content of such an operation consist? Even as it is, more and more apparatus - technical or technology-tinted variations on art - is being deployed with the primary aim of meeting the need for orientation in a re-ordered field of media and art. lt is a question of opposing this trend with a form surpassing the folkloristic celebration of so-called new possibilities. To this end, Thomas Roppelt chooses an approach that questions the techniques, objects, and locations deployed in relation to their perceptive orders and illustrates the interplay of their constituting elements.

Attempting to make a statement about a specific location, he uses the interface between computer and laser, between person and location, to underscore a basic conflict: namely, that the apparatus does/shows what I want. Equally, it determines what I can, or wish to, see. In this zone between generated alliance and forced distancing, a functional area arises in which a constructive and constructing element is both prerequisite for, and component of, implementation and production. In terms of perception, the order of manifestations (of that which appears) in this process indicates its own representational nature and modifiability. That which appears as something to be perceived and recognized ultimately remains dependent on factors that inevitably are constituted by elusive qualities. The impossibility of the possibility of a permanence of perception is broken down into its empirical components. Potency is proved and disproved at the same time, the fallacy of taking the visible for the factual is turned into a paradox.

Thomas Roppelt demonstrates the desire for continuity to be an approved, since habitforming, effect of plasticity. His playful autonomy allows him to deftly avoid the traps of the programmatic, and to skilfully balance between practice of performance, actioncentred sequential logic, and classical implementation.