SYNTHETIC TIMES - Media Art China 2008

Taken is a surveillance installation that provides two readings of the activities in the gallery space. A large gallery space has one wall taken up by two very large projections. On the left hand side, gallery visitors are extracted from the ground of the gallery floors and walls, and then looped back onto themselves at 20 seconds intervals. The result is that every action that has taken place in the gallery since the computer was turned on occurs together on the screen, repeating every 20 seconds. The image stream provides a kind of seething chaos of activity that can be read both as a statistical plot of gallery activities (where do most people stand to regard the piece? Do they move around?) and as a record of each act of each visitor. The image is densely social, deeply layered and chaotic. The right hand side is a cooler catalogue of the gallery visitors. Individual visitors are tracked within the space. Their heads are zoomed in on, and adjectives are attributed to them (i.e. 'unsuspecting', 'complicit', 'hungry'). These individual head shots are collected as a set of the last 200 visitors and presented as a matrix of 100 or occasionally all 200 shots, moving in slow motion. This side is analytical and highly ordered and rather threatening.

An immersive existence simulator and telepresence apparatus.

In Where are you? visitors are invited to fly, as in dreams, through a world of many dimensions, between past and future, light and darkness, the public and private. The immersed visitors use a joystick to move in the X, Y and Z axis of an information/experience space where scale matters.

At scale 0, the world looks like a simple XYZ grid defining the experience of the navigable space. At scale +1, the world turns into an archive of pictures, sounds, texts and objects (the author’s). Zooming out at scale +2, elements of this archive become particles in a “molecular” world of self-organizing clouds of lights reminiscent of late 19th century impressionistic views of the world and of a nascent abstraction. Zooming yet further out at scale +3 reveals a sublime landscape of mountains and valleys in tune with the 18th century idea of the picturesque.

At all these scales, visitors will encounter other inhabitants: live ones through telepresence links (if activated), pre-recorded subjects in video windows and, ultimately, themselves when hidden cameras transmit their own image in this constructed world. In Where are you? the subject (visitor, actor, protagonist) controls his/her position, the path and speed of his/her journey and, more interestingly perhaps, the scale at which he/she is prepared to “exist”.”


Support credits :

General concept, design, scenario, direction, production: Luc Courchesne
Software design, contents modeling and integration: Guillaume Langlois
Music, sound design, 3D audio systems: Luc Martinez
Lens design: D'nardo Colucci, The Elumenati; Simon Thibault, Immervision
Collaboration to screen design and fabrication: Sébastien Bire, Sébastien Dallaire
Created in collaboration with Université de Montréal and the Society for Arts and Technology [SAT]
 

Eye Contact is the first piece of the ShadowBox series of interactive displays with a built-in computerized tracking system. This piece shows eight hundred simultaneous videos of people lying down, resting. As soon as a public member is detected, his or her presence triggers the miniature video portraits to wake up: hundreds of people simultaneously turn to look at the visitor directly, creating an uncanny experience that questions who is the observer and who is the observed.