We are deranged

OK, now I'll wind back to last Thursday, where at approximately 4pm I am wandering around the Tate Modern, one of my favourite places in London, waiting to meet a friend at 5. I'd been at a Civil Service open day, and was also feeling worse for wear from the night before. All of the galleries at the Tate have recently been re-hung, and there are several darkened off rooms, with lots of chairs, that show experimental videos. I thought that such a room would be an ideal place to have a quick sleep.

Settling into one of the chairs, I found that my chosen piece of video art was not a relaxing array of rainforest scenes or waves crashing against the shore but a disturbing sequence of dusty hotel rooms, through which almost expressionless men and ladies walked with fixed expressions, ocassionally stopping to throw coats onto the floor, tie people up or adjust their clothing. What I found most unsettling however, was the creepy voiceover, parts of which are still stuck in my mind (I found the rest through a Google search, the piece is called Dictio pii by Markus Schinwald):

(man's voice) We are the perfume of corridors,
unfamiliarised with isolated activity,
traitors of privacy, utopian craftsmen,
pretty beggers not the product of poverty.
(lady's voice) We are pillared by mild sadness and polymorphic history,
eternally sceptical but we believe.
We are illiterates of perfection
We are deranged

It might not sound all that unsettling in black and white, but maybe it just did to me, in my tired state. The dialogue repeats many times over untill it becomes trance inducing, and I certainly wasn't put in the intended nice relaxed mood at all. Also what was interesting is that I've noticed that normally with these kinds of audio/visual installations people walk into the room for a minute or two, decide that they've seen enough and then leave. But I was watching the sequence for maybe twenty minutes, and by the time it was finished the room was packed full with perhaps thirty people, all similarly transfixed. Still wasn't sure what it was all about, though. I really want to know where I can buy it on DVD, to maybe freak people out!