My Cyclops
Room to See...(the viewer) in Camera
A play of digital and analog imagery in a darkened room with one eye on the outside world. An exploration of the automation of sight in a site-specific space. Whereas Manovich talks specifically about the more architectural conceptual movement from Renaissance perspective to photo-optics and into the geometric multi-perspective of the digital, this work moves into the realm of imag(e)ination. A projection of the memory of a building, made visible as it falls asleep. An optical meditation on an arbitrary place, vis- the back-door of our art school.
Viewers will enter the darkened top room through a curtain, and see a live pinhole image of the outside world inverted and hanging to the right. This is the primary vision, unadulterated and pure. It is there to provide an image-base from which to refer, and to eventually return to on the way out.
Enticed by subtle noises, and flashes, the veiwer will move into the next space, which is slightly hazy, and criss-crossed with light beams from projectors. On the far wall is a live webcam image of the same view provided by the pinhole. This time it is the right way up, and circular so as to echo the pinhole image. The distorted, wide-angle image resists resolving itself into a photo-optic image, but manifests itself as a digitised construct of the casual fixed gaze as a framed projection.
If there is no movement outside the room, the webcam image will become a reversed abstraction of the view of buildings, cars and the large tree, as if it's "eye" has closed. As soon as there is movement outside, the live webcam image will return. The animation will become more immersive the longer there is no movement outside, progressing from super-imposed flashes, to a bizarre mechanical dream (the fantasy of the old substation and the absent electrical organs), and eventually into a REM-like procession of time-lapsed imagery taken from the webcam. Eventually, the room will flatline into darkness, unconscious.
Only movement outside the room will wake it up.
The slides, if they work, will be recollections of various times and people as seen from the pinhole perspective.
The above take reference from Deleuze's definition of the body as an assemblage of images:
1. Perception - images (the pinhole, live)
2. Action - images (the webcam, processed)
3. Affection images (slides, memory)
The above take the body as "site of technical inscription of movement-images", whereas my 'vision-chamber' will place the body of the viewer "in camera obscura", to drift between the 'real' and the imagined.
Ref: www.manovich.net
New philosophy for new media / Mark B.N. Hansen.
posted by richard @ 6:20 PM
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