Academic painter and interdisciplinary creator Miha Vipotnik (1954) systematically researches and creates in the field of motion pictures. In his over thirty years of artistic experience, he has filmed, directed, produced and designed numerous artistic videos. Furthermore, he has created video installations, television programmes, advertising, propaganda and musical programmes, television editorials and film animations, whereby, by using experimental or formalistically mounted video system, he has developed a recognisable artistic language with greater emphases on the social criticism of the modern world. Viptonik’s artistic videos delve into the abundant levels of visuality and expand the complexity of the narrative, often highlighted through the dynamic revealing of the subject’s positions within a new-age society and powerful aggressiveness of this very society – the conflicted subject remains alone yet again, left to his personal activities and perpetual rebellion. Through his extensive opus, the artist gradually interplays the multiplicity in meaning of the movable scenes within the video images, where the associative levels are interwoven with the logical, into which the artist often incorporates himself in various national and social terrains. Many artistic videos spread some kind of video anthropology, they browse through the archives of the mind, the spiritual states in time and space, and they elucidate the particularities of the video aesthetic that connect to the potentials and relations of the developing modern video technologies. In the forefront of video images are the relationships towards the structures, the intermingling of many codes, a variety of critically aggressive effects of images which are either embedded in the activity of movement or in the passiveness and stillness of the moment. He very often dedicates himself to the issues of the meaning of space and time that define each other and, at the same time, limit the subjective (individual) or the objective (society-community) space and moment, and through the rhythm of video stories, creatively escalate the narrativity in various contexts. In certain videos, the systems of moving rhythm are captured in sequential arrangements and many a work is set up by the artist as a whole as spatial placements with emphases on the conceptual understanding of the displays so that they create a dynamic installation venue – spaces where the viewer is also challenged in various ways. They do not leave the installation untouched, but are filled with sensual and mental accents. Vipotnik is a creator of complex, multilayered spatial compositions that best feature his understanding of video as the most active creating, supported by modern technology. And what is more, these are not just similes, symbols, metaphors or the realities of everyday life connected with the images of social and political conditions, frequently captured in documentary and memorial as well as art-historical theoretical systems. Many of Vipotnik’s video narratives are indeed creatively ambivalent, fluctuating in recognition and semantic logic as the artist usually allows for various interpretational possibilities. In some pieces, the complexity of video speech is connected to the reminiscences of laughter. Laughter or humour occurs as a segment of possible responses from the viewer, although ordinarily only at the beginning of the perception as the artist develops the potentials for laughter and amusement in much more dramatic and socially critical systems that may be connected to political, military, societal, media aggressive and other various modern-day deviant states of society that is rampant around us. Laughter within the artist’s criticism is only a piece of the sensually expressive matter present in the pictures of modern living that the artist records in moving images and so creates the various layers of the manifestation of life. It occurs as a kind of magical component that can, for a moment, overcome obstacles, offer a shred of hope, bring relaxing moments and, as an immanent means, determines some of the potentials that could change the world. Vipotnik in his numerous creative video systems offers a social scenography of the turbulent world for the individual to critically ponder. For this particular exhibition he set up a spatial placement. You enter it through a black curtain on which there is a large yellow smiley face. A smile invites you into the space, in which a video projection (Without the Words , 2015) is displayed, separated into two vertical levels. The vertical layout of the videos relates to the principle of the upright figure, therefore the subject, the observers and the subject (artist) as the creator of all that is displayed. The artist acts as a facilitator within this relationship, the one who actively steps in an enables the communication process. The video projection above depicts military interventions carried out by the United States of America in Iraq and the wider Middle East area. From a bird’s-eye view you can see oil patches, fields of pupil-like black, intermittent empty and fire-marked towns, and over the top of these images, Vipotnik has placed an image of a smiley face that as a kind of leitmotif appears all through the video. Below the video showing images of military scenes, a video projection of a view from above (satellite images) of the dream city of Las Vegas, a synonym for gambling and all types of fun. The city of money, fame, wealth, elusive luck and short-lived satisfaction. Las Vegas is a metaphor for becoming rich, where, primarily, the triumph of winning money can resound with the sound of laughter. In the artist’s projection is fades away into a figural composition of both videos that on the imaginary horizon – the horizon of the viewer – the demolished images blend together, the fleeting archaeology of the modern social and military as well as highly aggressive greedy concept of life. The attributes of the present stand out through the accents of the images in a kind of textile sample, where laughter can occur as a possible, albeit confused instantaneous reaction to fleeting pleasures which in their essence signify destruction. Destruction with a smile. (souce: Sarival Sosič, Laughter and Creativity, exhibition catalogue Examles of Laughter in Art, City Gallery Ljubljana, 2015 (del besedila)