This installation extends the perception of an image out into space. It does so by expanding the image into seven planes or registers, which are designed to bracket the viewer's body as they walk through the space. A type of image-room is created within the physical room as the viewer is able to walk between these parallel image planes. Yet these different images are just different manifestations, reflections or refractions of a singular expanded image.
The first register is the mirror on the back wall of the space, this mirror acts as a window or portal that literally doubles the space from which the projector's image emanates. The second register is the back wall itself, which receives the biomorphic, liquid-like reflection off of the gel material which is used as a screen. The third register is the back of the screen, and the fourth register is the front. The fifth register is the opened mirror box structures. And finally the sixth and seven registers are the over-projections or spill images that fall on the floor and the top of the front wall. These two final registers are the original transmission of the image, the middle having been interrupted by the screen structure. These final registers act as a floor and ceiling for the body's interaction with this image room.
The projector mirror and the mirrors in the screen structure--as far as the waves and particles of light are concerned--create deep wells of space or holes in the fabric of the space of the room. This part of the installation is transgressive as it willfully disorients the viewer, but paradoxically
this also provides one of the main aspects of seduction. Some other simpler means of seduction created by the mirrors are the infinity effect and the kaleidoscope effect. These latter effects ground the piece in nostalgia but also add a bit of elementary school science lab irony. Finally I would like to point out the two different mirror effects, the non-distorted first-surface mirror that extends the length of the projection, which is more analogous to a metaphysical or science fiction-like portal in space, vs. the distortion created by the second-surface mirrored boxes, which is analogous to our subjective experience of the world, that is seeing "through a glass darkly".
The screen structure is the inflection point, the interruption of the projector's transmission. It is literally the container for the image light--a type cage or fine netting that can hold light. But then the structure becomes its own transmitter, projecting the image-light forward, reflecting the image into infinity and--in its ultimate transformation--reflecting backwards, diffracting the waves of light, disrupting the Modernist and Euclidean grids of logic within the images and turning them into seething tendrils of organic shapes that both mimic bodily functions and airplane flight patterns. This inflection point sends the image out centrifugally but it is also centripetal as the viewers attention is always brought back to its center. Transmitting, for we obviously live in an era structured around transmitting, transmitting and receiving, downloading and uploading, bits, ones and zeros--transmuting.
And then there is the film itself, its own matrix of bits, its own binary code. It is a morse code where we again find the modernist grids dissolving and resolving through the film's movement, diffraction and fractal-like patterns. Though these are abstract, geometric-patterned images an organic pulse is interspersed with the more mechanical stutter. This is a film built with history, German experimental film, Stan Brakhage's "Index of Light", the structuralists Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow. This is Modernism designed to be disrupted and transmitted by the inflection point of the screen structure.
There is also irony in the choice of materials. The over-arching goal is to create a room of image light, similar to what a cathedral does with stain-glass windows--though my cathedral is an intimate transcendental experience, as it is a small room. Still, here I am making the material immaterial, but I am doing it with fundamentally cheap stuff. The film is made with air conditioning filters and plastic sheeting--the film is not even a film, it is digital video, edited with generic software with a simple click of a mouse. The screen structure is prefab metal shelving, common photographic material and extruded acrylic; the light, a home entertainment device. We live in a world structured with prefabricated material, but we can make magic out of this stuff.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment