Artist:
Ann Lislegaard (born 1962 in Norway; lives and works in New York City, USA and Copenhagen, Denmark).

Materials:
3D animation; no sound.

Description:
“Crystal World (after J. G. Ballard) is a 3-D animation about a journey to an abandoned hotel in a wilderness that is slowly crystallizing. As the animation moves through architectural spaces that combine elements of Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidrio (1951) and Oscar Niemeyer’s Matarazzo Pavilion (1957), quotes from the protagonist of Ballard’s 1966 novel, Sander, describe a zone of entry and transformation. Using it to highlight the contrasts between modernity and entropy, progress and perversion, mineral light and the heart of darkness of enlightenment, Robert Smithson cited The Crystal World in his writings, and the novel was an inspiration for his mirrored structures. Besides Smithson’s The Dead Tree (1969), Crystal World (after J. G. Ballard) includes “characters” such as Untitled (Rope Piece) (1970) by Eva Hesse, elements from Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau (1920), Lina Bo Bardi’s furniture designs and Bruno Taut’s modernist building Glass House (1914). All of these ‘virtual replicants’ are re-activated in the animation as provisional characters in a depopulated setting where time is ruined.”
—”Crystal World (after J. G. Ballard),” website of Ann Lislegaard.

“Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) is an evocative and silent 3-D animation. A journey to an abandoned hotel situated in a slowly crystallising dense wilderness. There are traces of a catastrophe. Water is forcing its way through the architecture. Chairs, beds, and cupboards are displaced, drifting through the rooms. The crystalline world that emerges is one of infinite reflections. It is sci-fi scenario of change and destabilization.

“In Crystal World (after J. G. Ballard) Lislegaard investigates the possibility of creating an alternative reality. A new structure that challenges our usual preconceptions of time and place. Lislegaard uses the crystal as a metaphor to describe how the experience of the present and the physical surroundings are filtered through previous accumulation and breakdown of memories and experiences. A mental state in decay and change at one and the same time—a super-crystalline structure.”
—”New Exhibition. Ann Lislegaard: Crystal World,” Statens Museum for Kunst, February 20, 2007.