Within Dutch media art, Pieter Baan Müller obstinately goes his own way. With relatively simple, elementary, means, and often with several different media, which, like a true tinkerer, he bends to his own will, he always playfully and poetically depicts everyday events and situations which are, at the same time, full of significance due to the intimate place they hold in his life, as a memory, experience, idea or emotion.

Müller transforms basically trivial images and banal situations, whether this be a motorway by night or a pursuit, into exiting representations, devoid of any arbitrariness. By the way in which he lets the technological 'hardware' play a constructive, graphic, concrete and undisguised role in his installations, he also demonstrates that he is not so much interested in apparatus, but rather in the link between man and machine, which can sometimes have a tragicomic effect.

In such installations as Autoweg (Motorway, 1992) and Amsterdamned II (1994), Müller always showed an event spread over several monitors, so that precisely the spaces between the monitors made elements such as space, time and movement, physically tangible. He also applied this compositional form to Maracaïbo, albeit in a more minimalistic way.

Maracaïbo - Ships that pass in the night looks austere, clear and elementary, even formalistic almost: three identical computer monitors stand side-by-side on three upright pedestals; their images, seen from left to right, are green, grey and red. Formal colour fields, almost in the abstract, geometric tradition of Mondriaan. However, if you take enough time for Maracaïbo, there is actually a great deal happening. Title, sound, image, movement and light together tell the story of "Ships that pass in the night".

There is the rumbling sound of machinery, and, unexpectedly, a red, triangular form begins to move across the light and dark grey fields of the centre monitor, and then disappears again - to be sure, like a ship passing by. A white light flashes through this image. Literally and figuratively, there is motion in Maracaïbo. The separation between the two colour fields on the centre screen functions as a horizon, and you can experience the movement of the image, which begins at a random moment, as if you yourself were standing on the bridge of a heavy rolling ship, sailing over the horizon...

The sounds were recorded in the engine room of a ship, while the light signals are of the same frequency as the Maracaibo lighthouse... Müller was once a long-haul sailor himself. He recorded these sounds then, for his father. All these years later, he has gone back in time and reconstructed an image from his memory. An image that is clear, but comes and goes. As with the installation, because suddenly the monitors show only static colour fields again. As if time does not play a role...

Jorinde Seijdel