Monica Studer & Christoph van den Berg: Package Holiday
Until September 4; Baltic, Gateshead

Thomas Cook booked the very first package holiday to the Swiss Alps in 1863. The unspoilt beauty of the mountains, with all their goat-herding charms, drew Victorians in their thousands, and so of course, they became spoilt. But still we cherish a Heidi-esque dream of the Alps, covered in the purest snow, the most ancient forests, and the wildest flowers.

Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg share that dream, but it’s a lucid one. In their new Baltic commission, Mountain Top, the Swiss artists recreate the alpine idyll with a knowing postmodern wink. One whole wall is a computer-generated mountainscape, complete with alpine flowers, snow-dusted peaks and swirling mists. A bench sits on a raised grey platform in front of the scene, and once on it, you’re part of the illusion.

The whole world can tune into a live video stream, of you, sitting on a bench in the Alps, taking in the fresh mountain air and the perfect view. You know it’s not real, because the artists have make no attempt to hide the floorboards, the wallpaper joins, or the wooden platform from you. But the outside world, tuning into the web, might fall for it.

As you sit, self-conscious, on the bench, it’s impossible to resist a peek at the streamed image on the wall to your right. There’s something about the view with you in it that’s more appealing than the unpopulated version. And that’s the point. It wasn’t enough for the Victorians that this beautiful unspoilt territory existed; they had to place themselves in it, and see themselves in it. Not only that, but they wanted the world to see them too.

Mountain Top is great fun, and the star attraction of the show. Also featured are the artists’ online hotel, which you can navigate around in a clunky way reminiscent of the earliest video games, and their livecam of the imaginary Gleissenhorn weather station. You can choose your time and date, past or present, in which to see the mountain and its weather.

The websites themselves don’t hold your interest for long, but the obvious question is whether the experience of using an imaginary webcam is any different from that of a real one. What we get, either way, is a collection of pixels and data which our brain interprets as a picture of a place. Either way, it exists, to us, only in our imagination.

By inviting us to enter physically into their Mountain Top fiction, the artists have further confused the boundaries between real and imagined. You know this paper mountain is real, but the artists get what they want when you start to doubt the truth of the “real thing” too.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 31.07.05