@ the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (May 13 – 23, 2009), ACAD

Software: chaotic line drawing in  Processing(TUIO Client),

real time ambient sound sampling and delayed playback in max/msp,

touch sensitive tracking in Community Core Vision (CCV)/tbeta

Hardware: 80/20

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see.saw

I see you there, I saw you here

seesaw going up and down

the ghost in the machine, the minotaur in the labyrinth

collections of memories, talk

touch

sound

memory again

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“… they knew there would be a change, but at the last moment, beyond all the moments in between. It wouldn’t be today, or tomorrow, or any day that could be determined in advance. Like the spectrum of perception, the spectrum of happening is divided by a threshold. That threshold is just where it is, and nowhere else.”

p. 8, Ghosts, César Aira, Translated by Chris Andrews (New Directions Publishing, 2008)

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May 13 – 23, 2009

@ Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary

The person we see in the picture is not in front of us physically; it is an illusion (reflection) of the person who is on the other side of the hallway. In see.saw, we see around corners but are not aware that we do so. We see/experience mixed time and space of the visual/auditory environment.

inside view

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two sides of hallways – reflections from the mirror

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reflection on the wall

interaction with the multi-touch screens

see.saw installation view at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary

interaction with the touch screens

April 2009

            “see.saw” is an interactive environment in which the participant experiences a psychological re-mix of multiple time/space percepts through their physical presence in a virtual/manipulated reality. This project encourages the participant’s exploration through their interaction with the environment by active auditory/tactile sensing.

The work ‘short-circuits’ understanding of our presence in time and space, through a shifting displacement of the normally expected perceptual distinction between oneself and the other. The audience hears over-layered sounds of captured past and current times – mixed/accumulated auditory memories of time and space. Inner core walls collect the traces of the participant’s touch/visualization. These compositional environments are encouraged by multi-touch/visualization technology on the screens in the walls – mixed/accumulated visual memories of time and space.

            The Audience enters into the L-shaped dim hallway space and perceives a reflected extended space in which they are standing, in which other persons may also appear (if there are other beings in the other arm of the hallway), though these ‘others’ are somehow more distant visually than their sound suggests – perceptual displacement occurs. As the participant gets close to the mirrored corner surface of the L-shaped construction, the content for their view in the reflected mirror is substituted with an unknown context which seems to be present where the observer should be present. The audience also hears layered sounds (or voices) of past and current presences.

            The work experiments with human psychological sense assumptions about reality through tactile/physical human sensing (and/or perception). I am interested in time and space; mixed, inconsistent, non-linear, and in loops of time and space, in span/spam, in memory, and in multiple mixed realities. Mixed time and space, mixed bodies – objects (interfaces), perceptions, and memories, again. I want to offer an experience in which the participant may perceive remixed time and space, and is thus situated in the awareness of virtual/real (un)realities. Our existence is neither real nor reality (‘what actually happened’) but beingmay be both (localized) real (I – body, objecthood, or interface) and reality (I – mind, subjectivity, or concept) (‘what happened for the perceiver’, a self-defining reduction of reality).

“see.saw”: the ghost in the machine. My work is research, play, and experimentation; on-going, never ending, hunting the ghost.

April, 2009