ŠTĚPÁNKA TRČKOVÁ

Landscapes

Game Media Studio

Your graduate exhibition presents a scenography made of mobile scenery which played a part in the workshop preceding the exhibition: what was the workshop about and what did you have the participants do?
During the workshop, the participants were given reference photographs of the landscape, which I used as a basis for creating the backdrops and scenes. The photographs recorded the time and camera settings which the participants could use as a point of departure for their photography. The entire scene had dynamic lighting which changed from morning to evening light over the course of a single hour.
The participants therefore manipulated the backdrops and explored different compositions and the behavior of shapes under changing lighting conditions. I left it up to them whether they would be inspired by the photographs or just play with the scene and visuals.

Light plays a key role in your thinking. For me, this is something that connects your interest in photography with the theater scene, which the installation may resemble, and also with game design (or at least 3D graphics) which you studied at FFA. Is that a correct assumption? How are these fields related?
Yes, rather than a theatrical scene, I see it as a stylized environment that allowed people to observe similarities with a real landscape that had been transferred from reality into a scene, and to be further inspired by it. This also happens in game design, where the landscape is usually modelled as realistically as possible, but the space’s atmosphere and personal impressions are often neglected.

How important is the installation’s interactive aspect for you?
Making the scene interactive gave the participants the opportunity to perceive it in different ways. Personally, it was interesting for me to watch how each group of participants worked with the composition in a different way and saw different things in it. Some of the compositional solutions the participants came up with had not occurred to me before, which was enriching. It was also stimulating to watch how the participants collaborated in creating the composition and photographs together, and how they shared their visions and experiences with photography.

photo: Polina Davydenko