Berndt’s multi-channel video installation presents the image space of the screen as a poetic and virtual extension of the studio space. Simultaneously flat and deep, the image space of the screen is a paradoxical space, capable of holding on its surface a multi-layered world, expressive of both physical appearances and the abstract poetic depths of the imagination.
As the screen becomes an increasingly dominant part of contemporary life, one might suggest it functions like a prosthesis, virtually extending and representing the body. Our day to day relationship with the screen and digital imagery has the potential to reform our physical sense of identity and alter the way we perceive and produce visual information.
Confronted by the flat surface of the screen, Berndt questions how “depths, the interior, the subjective, and the private (can)… be seen in terms of surfaces, bodies, and material relations”1.
1 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies : Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 1994), 160.