Scanner Room is a site-specific installation by Polish artist Karolina Halatek that looks like the inside of a celestial copy machine and explores the "potentional introspection" sparked by overexposure to light. Specifically designed for the Centre of Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland, the project implements LEDs, aluminum, and an engine to submerge the gallery space and its visitors in a luminescent blanket—"an environment constructed by light and filled with it."
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Halatek's work strives to examine the relation between visual and metaphysical spheres, and this minimal, albeit irradiant, installation has the potential to inspire what the artist describes as "a state of concentration, a meeting and exchange with one's own self." In other words, transcendence through illumination."The space has been created for people to be inside it," Halatek writes. "In this case, the visible is only the beginning of an individual experience that may be colored with different emotions and states of consciousness…Its intensity develops with time and may get you close to meditation, but it can also take the form of a momentary flash of light, a transient feeling or image."Though it may be subtle and fleeting, the moment when we're hit with a camera flash or the ebullient glow of copy machine can have a tranquilizing effect. There's the idea of "Pure Being" from I Heart Huckabees that when humans are subject to a deluge of sensory stimuli, we can embrace the sensation and enter a nirvana-like state for a stunning second. We imagine Scanner Room to be a spiritual space that can inspire some zen-like epiphanies if fully embraced. If you commit your mind and body to the waves of light, chances are you'll never look at your office's copy machine the same way again.
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