Top 84 Ways of Going Greener at Home
In many of his works, Krassimir Terziev uses the language and technology of cinema and television to investigate and comment on how their shared visual culture shapes or affects our social and political world in unexpected ways.
His latest work, Top 84 Ways of Going Greener at Home, created specifically for gallery Gallery, is a digital tapestry that consists of 84 green screen stock videos, all running in parallel on infinite repeat.
Green screens are used in cinema, television and in the game industry to remove a person or object from its background so that these can be placed in a new setting. This new composite image is by definition one that is otherwise hard or impossible to create, either physically or because of the effort, money or danger involved. Every image that Terziev selected for his green screen tapestry falls well within this category.
The green screen is one of cinema's most powerful tools to create illusions where the impossible becomes believable.
Top 84 Ways of Going Greener at Home can only be seen through a device that is connected to gallery Gallery's wifi network. In most cases, this device is the visitor's own telephone or tablet.
Terziev uses our intimate relationship with these screens to allow visitors to become completely enveloped in his green screen tapestry. He refers to it as this "perfect interior that lets you teleport yourself anywhere in the world and beyond, just not here. A place where you can expand your fantasies freely, without the constraints of your circumstances. As a quantum particle, you can even be in several places at once. You can change the past, present and future according to your mood. It is telemagic, equal only to the art of Anatoly Kashpirovsky."
In other words, this is Netflix binging on steroids.
There is, however, another side to the work. Green screen technology came into widespread use around the same time when "green" entered our political discourse in the 70s and 80s of the last century.
Today, we are surrounded by an endless array of products and services, produced by countless startups that have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding, all to sell us on the promise that these products and services will help us live greener better lives. These products and services will magically separate us from our environment and teleport us into green living bliss, even if that is only a substitute composite which, like the stock video in Top 84 Best Ways to Become Greener at Home, is too difficult to realise otherwise.
Top 84 Ways of Going Greener at Home was conceived in the months before the Covid-19 pandemic, and was originally planned to open in the week in which much of world went into lockdown. Two months later, with the experience of having to stay at home for weeks on end, Krassimir's work takes on a new meaning.
Top 84 Ways of Going Greener at Home has been realised with support from the Solidarity in Culture programme, Sofia Municipality.