projects
Invocation and Interference
(2000)
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The museum experience of Time&Time Againis driven by a sensual connection between participants and media, while the reach of human communication through technology is addressed in the online experience of the piece. These themes are revisited in a different arena in Invocation and Interference (INx2), which was first shown at "Interferences: International Festival of Electronic Art" in Belfort, France. Time & Time Again begins with the idea that the human desire to communicate by transcending the body and prevailing over the limitations of time and space is enduring.
At the personal level, this need gives rise to innumerable cultural practices that regularly overlap and collide, producing unexpected readings and relational interpretations. INx2 explores this phenomenon as experienced from a car traveling in the Argentine pampas. As one travels the immense distances of this region, two modes of very intimate communication collide in public articulation. On the one hand, the traveler encounters countless small religious shrines on the side of the road. These shrines, located in the middle of nowhere, represent promises, rememberings, gratitudes, and requests to powers beyond the physical. Each shrine articulates a personal vision of popular faith and a transferring of the most intimate to the most public. At the same time, on the regional radio stations announcers regularly read personal messages destined to those who live and work in the countryside away from the reach of the telephone. These messages cover a broad set of communicational priorities, from the mundane to the tragic. For an anonymous and casual traveler, the intersection of these two communicational modes represents a significant interpretative experience.
Upon entering INx2, participants see a group of monitors of different sizes positioned on pedestals of different heights. From the distance, it is clear that they reveal sections of a composite video image: the landscape of the pampas as seen from a traveling car. The sound of wind and the tuning of a car radio searching for a station is audible. Upon moving towards a particular monitor to the point where it dominates the visual field, the viewer is presented with a video view of a road shrine from a static camera position. This footage is selected at random from a large database collection. Radio messages play from that monitor at low volume, forcing the viewer to get closer to hear more clearly. As the viewer moves closer there is a realization that his/her body controls a zoom effect over the video image allowing more careful examination of the shrine. Ultimately as the sound becomes clearer, the extreme level of zoom causes the images to become distorted. Each of the monitors functions independently allowing multiple participants to navigate the piece simultaneously. Monitors that have no participants nearby continue to show the passing landscape. From a distance, the group of monitors with participants in INx2 becomes a real-time, dynamic, superimposed collage of a number of forces: the driving through the pampas, the shrines of faith, the radio station's personal messages, and the interaction of the local participants.
By moving their body to explore the piece, the participants in INx2 create a sort of collective choreography with the video images for those watching from behind. David Saltz (1997) has argued that all computer-based participatory experiences are intrinsically performative. The role of the user's presence in the system of an interactive piece takes on an element of performance as the participant does what is necessary to explore it. In a second focus of our research, we explore the implications of digital technology for traditional performance work and for pieces like Hamletmachine, which are part exhibition, part installation, and part performance.
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