“Seeing can often be a balance between staring, which means that you concentrate your attention on an object right in front of you, and the mobility of a look that could be qualified as absentminded.” This balance is at work in Thomas Köner´s Banlieue du Vide (2003), which uses webcam pictures of winter landscapes. Köner describes the project:

“In the course of last winter I collected (via the Internet) about 3000 pictures taken by surveillance cameras. The images I selected show empty roads at night, covered with snow. The soundtrack consists of grey noise and traffic sounds, created from memory. The only visible movements are the changes in the snow covering the roads.”

Although the piece deals with surveillance and the Internet, it doesn’t refer to issues connoting suppression or control. Banlieue du Vide is much more a series of pictures of snow-covered landscapes that are subject to patient and unremarkable observation. We are invited to observe time passing. The artist shows us snow-covered landscapes slowly appearing and disappearing in a delicate process of fade-in and fade-out.

The sense of transition and disappearance is evoked by the slow movement of the pictures the artist has chosen, and also by the sound composed by Köner. Together, they give the piece a timeless quality. Banlieue du Vide refers to the existential quality of everything that is in the process of disappearing. Waiting and absence define our existence: what we are looking at is always fading away from us. Thomas Köner is underlining the importance of the trace, of erosion and also of time passing.