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"See for yourself" |
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| The viewer emerges from the double row formed by the
confronting works to descend into a little cubicle at the front of the container, to the
right. This small space houses three audio-video screens. The world only just explored,
all that the viewer has just seen is suddenly alive, moving about, transforming itself and
interacting in its own dynamic. The visuals are simple in their interpretation, a
combination of 3D modeling, hand drawn animation and macro-camera filming. The same reel is played on three different TV screens, at staggered intervals, the second and third reels running a few frames behind the first. The result of this timing, combined with the specific storyline, is a cyclical continuum in three different views. Each screen tells the same story in syncopated time, so that each is set apart and all are brought together by the spectator. Furthermore, a hidden video camera is filming the viewer so that a particular moment a frame of the film will actually be the image of the current viewer. The spectator becomes part of the story, the seer is now the seen, but only just before he disappears in the midst of another transformation. Note : The artist intends that personalized CD-ROMs of the filmlet, with the appearance of any particular viewer inserted, should be available to the public. |
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ECHOES |
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This traveling show, half circus, half medicine van and preacher's tent proposes to engage the viewer's consciousness in a leap of faith and fantasy where reality and fact are the puppet masters. "Art is a mediumistic activity" Marcel Duchamp "In the year 1800, the German critic Friedric Schiegel contended that modern literature lacked a center, `such as mythology was for the ancients'. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had taught men to contemplate the real world, stripped of all mythic explanations. `I must create my own system,' said the poet William Blake, `or be enslaved by another man's.' It is notorious, however, that the paintings and poems which embody that system still present ferocious difficulties to the deciphering reader. Over a hundred years later, W. B. Yeats, deprived of a Christian mythology by evolutionary science and the higher criticism, felt equally compelled to create his own system in A vision, (...). The human need to make myths is very deep-rooted, since myths are symbolic projections of the cultural and moral values of a society, figurings of its psychic state. The French Revolution, which purported to put an end to all myth making, instituted the myth of modernity, the notion of perpetual renewal which animated spirits as diverse as those of Ezra Pound (`make it new') and Leon Trotsky (`permanent revolution'). Standing on the verge of modernity in 1800, Schlegel proved himself a prophet, in the sense of one who saw so deeply into the artistic conditions of his own time that the shape of future texts became discernible. He foretold the emergence of a new mythology, which would be less a radical act of creation than a `collaboration' between old and new. Ancient myths embodied people's immediate response to their physical experience and were not seen as fictive by their adherents; but the new mythology would be abstract and aware of its own fictive status. `It must be the most artificial of works of art, for it is to encompass all others', he declared; `it is to be a new course or vessel for the ancient, eternal fountain head of poetry and itself the everlasting poem which contains within itself the seeds of all other poems. Declan Kiberd. |
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