Greenscreen

12:18 min, 4:3, stereo, 2010

Greenscreen

(…) In her videowork “Greenscreen” (2010), Petra Lottje mocks the seeming oneness of the speaker seen and the speaker heard. Using excerpts from TV commercials and films, she replaces all images of the speakers heard with a single image — herself.
Now the image of the speaker never changes, but the audio track does, creating alternating incongruency effects that are sometimes funny, sometimes grotesque or disturbing. Lottje “speaks” with both masculine and feminine voices, and even the women’s voices are often at odds with the performer’s outer appearance.
What we have here is a double-cross, a productive rupture between speech act and speaker. But there is more to the double-crossing, as can be seen in “Greenscreen”.
“Green screen”, or color keying, is a commonly used technique in film and television in which actors perform in front of a green backdrop, which can then be replaced by any other background (e.g. the map seen in most weather forecasts). However, the green screen can also be seen as a metaphor for lip-syncing.
The commercials, spoken in voice-over and lip-synced by Petra Lottje, juxtapose image and sound so as to emphasize the falseness of the advertisements. Maybe the next time we see a commercial at the movies or on TV, we will remember the glaring green screen and feel how the sounds and images disassociate themselves in our minds. Our subliminal identification with the commercials we watch could, for once, be undermined by a new perception of our own selves.
(text excerpts “Synchronization Split”, Ursula Panhans-Bühler, 2010)