Abstract
Title of Thesis:
Penumbra: Between Space, Time, and Representation
Geoffrey Michael Bell, Master of Fine Arts, 2006
Thesis directed by: Dr. Preminda Jacob
Associate Professor
Department of Visual Arts
Penumbra: Between Space, Time and Representation is an interactive
video installation that blurs the boundaries between visual projections of oneself,
other viewers, and pre-recorded video of previous visitors to the installation.
Entering the dark space of the installation, viewers encounter a large
projection of standing figures that return their gaze. These pre-recorded figures
disappear and reappear on different parts of the screen at irregular intervals.
Each viewer’s image also appears on the screen superimposed on the prerecorded figures. Because of the penumbra like quality of the projections
viewers are never quite certain whether they are seeing themselves or looking at
figures pre-recorded by the artist. The interactive elements in the video projection
were created with the software Max/MSP/Jitter.
Above all else, Penumbra is an experiment, incorporating juxtapositions
that include real time versus delayed time, the representation of self versus the
other and the notion of social space versus anti-social space. The advent of
technologies such as cell phones and computers have tended to suppress social
interaction in public spaces. Responding to this new form of sociality Penumbra
investigates the complex interaction between private and social space in the
public sphere. My primary goal in this experiment is to compress these
juxtapositions within an installation that explores our perceptual and cognitive
capacities. It is my hope that viewers experiencing the formal, psychological and
conceptual dimensions of this installation will reflect on their daily encounters in
the social sphere.
Acknowledgments
I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to all those who have helped me with this
project. In particular, I want to thank my thesis chair, Dr. Preminda Jacob, for her
enthusiasm, support, editing suggestions and countless resources that she
contributed to my research at UMBC. Also, I would like to thank my thesis
committee, Professor Lynn Cazabon, Professor Vin Grabill and Affiliate Professor
James Mahoney, for their timely suggestions, criticism and support of my efforts
in developing this installation. Finally, I want to thank my family, especially my
mother and father, for giving me unconditional support over the years.
I. Introduction
In an age of uncertainty, when the disciplines of the arts and sciences are
simultaneously breaking down and converging into eclectic practices, the desire
for artists to embody the role of psychologist, anthropologist or sociologist seems
only natural.
This research represents an array of influences, observations, and
reflections in my work over the past decade. The essay is divided into three
sections. In the first section I delve into my work and artistic influences from the
past and how they have come to inform my current work. In the second section I
explore the various systems and devices deployed in the Penumbra installation
from a technological, psychological and social perspective. Finally I discuss
various scientific inquiries that have influenced my art making. Here I allude to
‘penumbra,’ that part of the shadow where the light source is only partially
blocked, as a metaphor for exploring the interstices between various
corporeal representations.
Description of the Thesis Exhibition
The Penumbra Installation
“Penumbra: Between Space, Time and Representation” is an interactive
video installation that attempts to blur the boundaries between representations of
oneself, the other, and pre-recorded video of visitors in the installation (see figure
1). The viewer is never quite certain whether he is seeing his own image or
looking at figures pre-recorded by the artist.
As the viewer enters a dark space, he encounters a large projection of
standing figures that return his gaze. These pre-recorded figures disappear and
reappear on different parts of the screen at irregular intervals (this is
accomplished by using a time delay). The viewer’s image also appears on the
screen superimposed on the pre-recorded figures. Through the use of video
tracking software, the viewer’s image starts to reappear on different parts of the
screen based on the movements of the viewer. When the participant moves, his
or her image gets repositioned on the screen. If the participant remains still, the
mirrored image remains directly in front of the viewer. If multiple participants
enter the space one individual’s representation may, at times, be projected in
front of another viewer’s gaze.
The installation works both on an individual level and as a social space in
which the interaction with other participants is in constant flux. The video, which
is stylistically consistent, depicts both the pre-recorded viewer-participants and
real-life viewer-participants as semi-defined shadows to accentuate the ambiguity
of the represented figures.
The overall experience is one of a dislocation of time and space in which
the participant is negotiates between past and present, memory and reality,
stasis and change.
Technical Information
The piece is installed in a blackbox installation space with an eleven foot
wide projection screen on one side of the room and a brightly lit wall on the
opposite side of the space. When viewers stand in front of the brightly lit wall, a
video camera captures their image and projects a partial silhouette on the
projection screen that they face. This camera is embedded in the projection
screen so that the relationship between the viewer and the screen is like that of a
mirror.
The interactive elements used in the video projection were created using a
program called Max/MSP/Jitter. With this cutting-edge software application I
designed my own digital signal-processing environment. Max/MSP is the sound
generating software while Jitter is the set of video processing and matrix
manipulation extensions to Max/MSP. The program is a graphical development
environment that is highly modular, with routines existing in the form of shared
libraries. Creating the interactive program for this installation was like drawing a
graphic diagram that not only mapped the appearance1 of the interactive video
but also mapped the program.
1
Because of the graphic nature of the Max/Msp/Jitter interface, it is quite possible to map out the
appearance of the installation using the modular objects in the program as a form of
diagramming.
Early Influences and Early Works
Installation Artists: Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Fluxus
Early in my career, I developed a fascination with the work of Robert Irwin
and James Turrell, two artists who developed artwork exploring visual perception
beginning in the 1960s. Irwin, famous for his ephemeral scrim installations,
explored the phenomena of light, and also created site-generated-conditional art;
works that were developed in reaction to a specific space. James Turrell, most
known for his Roden Crater project, developed works by shaping light into an
illusion of physical form. In 1968, Turrell and Irwin collaborated with NASA
scientist Ed Wortz to exchange ideas, experiment with light and partake in
several solitary experiences by sitting in anechoic chambers2 (rooms that allowed
a person to experience desensitization). Through these experiments Turrell and
Irwin first realized the insignificance of the art object3 and the potential for
viewers to generate their own experiences through subtle nuances in constructed
environments. If the Fluxus artists extended the Duchampian legacy of audience
2
To echo the Minimalist’s dictum, that ‘less is more’, Turrell eloquently describes the cognitive
and perceptual characteristics of sensorial depravity: “The question about light, First of all, I would
like to say that there never is no light - the same way you can go into an anechoic chamber that
takes away all sound and you find that there never really is silence because you hear yourself.”
3
Frank Popper’s essay, “Art, Action and Participation” describes the disappearance of the art
object as a persistent theme throughout the 20th century. Popper integrates Benjamin’s notion of
the aura as something demystified and alludes to an increasing inclusion of participatory
involvement. Popper’s substantiates his thesis by looking at an array of different movements
such as Op-art, Nouveau Realism, Fluxus ect.
participation through event scores and performance, then Turrell and Irwin
extended the audience participation through formal and physical means,
including the affective influences of light and shadow.
My objective in Penumbra is to combine these models of audience
participation pioneered by Turrell and Irwin through formal representations of the
body and event triggering mechanisms through the use of video tracking.
Composite Forms
The power of the installation lies in the co-authorship between creator and
participant. The artist provides a constructed space and viewers depend on their
reactions and bodily awareness to discover, imagine, and creatively form a
unique experience of that space.
Before beginning my graduate studies at UMBC I had a keen interest in
developing works based on how bodily movements determine the perception of
form within an object. Using the formal characteristics of a cocktail straw as a unit
of color from which light could emanate, just as a pixel is a unit of a digital
composition, I compiled hundreds of straws to create holographic-type images
that are only visible from the proper positioning of the body. These “Composite
Forms” as I call them, separate two-dimensional space and three-dimensional
space while simultaneously sustaining a unification between the two. As one
image illuminated by light in the rear of the straw constructions comes into view,
the projected image on front of the straws dissipates from view. These works
tend to slow down perception, refocus attention and create relationships and
juxtapositions between images that continuously undergo metamorphosis. More
importantly was the realization that I could form complex dialectics between two
opposing subject matters or image projections.
In Utopian Station (2003) I made a composite construction that examined
issues surrounding the modern American political psyche. On the front of the
composite form is a projected black and white image of the “The Emerald City”,
while in the rear of the straws is an illuminated colored version of “The Emerald
City”. When first confronted with the work from a distance, one only sees the
colored version emanating through the straws, but upon further movement down
a corridor towards the piece, the colored image emanating through the straws
dissipates, revealing the black and white image projected on front of the straws
(see figure 2). The addition of audio, playing sound bytes from Eisenhower’s
persuasive speech for the strength of America, underlines the propagandistic
aspects of the image. Utopian Station recalls the Warholian mass-produced
iconic image, in this case, The Emerald City, as a symbol for Utopia, the
American dream and the answer to all our problems. Yet the closer the viewer
gets to this idealization, this iconic image, the more distilled and washed out the
saturated image becomes, thus morphing The Emerald city into a dystopian
black and white image. The process of breaking down the illusion as the viewer
gets closer is the process of seeing the object bare, stripped of its illusion. Thus,
the closer you get towards the object, the closer you get to discovering that you
are figuratively approaching the man behind the curtain, the mechanics behind
the illusion4.
The legacy of the Pop image is its potent familiarity shared across cultures
and embedded in our psyche. In one sense, it remains an illusion yet at the
same time, appears so real. This paradox between proximity and distance to an
iconic image that Warhol5 tapped into is something we cannot seem to get away
from and has proliferated into common objects. We have an attachment to
machines such as our cars and computers, though it is inconceivable, even
bizarre to have any substantial relationship with them. Who can tell what the
future of machines will bring us. Unless our machines can become sentient, we
have only our bodies to accord with.
This idea of proximity and distance is heightened in Penumbra, which,
while it presents the viewer with the most familiar image of all, his own body,
simultaneously denies him the possibility of establishing a comfortable
relationship with himself.
Theatrical Influences
4
The illusion I refer to is a perceptual illusion like a static image that appears to move. The
composite construction I built does not include any known perceptual illusion but acts as a
simulated illusion that invokes a suspension of disbelief.
5
Stephen Kock’s book, “Stargazer, the life, world and films of Andy Warhol” influenced my
reference to the notion of proximity and distance in relation to pop images. Kock mentions how
Warhol’s films such as “Sleep” and “Haircut” simultaneously pull and push the viewer in and out
of the narrative and frame.
Any presentation of a work of art, through the context of expected viewership - museums, galleries, and sculpture gardens - is inherently theatrical6.
Through the interactive and embodied nature of the viewer, this theatricality
dissipates unleashing a moment of intense concentration, a kind of day dreaming
that overpowers any expectation that something is being presented by someone.
In 1999, I had the opportunity to serve in the capacity of art director for
stage adaptation of Frank Zappa’s famed album, Joe’s Garage, at the University
of Michigan. The show used the talents of approximately fifty students from
various disciplines to integrate dance, musical theater, multimedia projections
and live music. What emerged from a visual perspective was a process of
breaking down barriers between media using live video, character animation, and
pre-recorded video that surrounded the stage and audience. We learned that
with all the tools at our disposal, video and digital stills could be used as both
passive and active environments, supporting scenes with simple backdrops or in
the forefront as cinematic experiences.
The challenge I faced was that of balance; how to merge the imaginary
space of the video projections with the live action performances in the theatrical
environment without overpowering one or the other. At times, actors became
spectators, witnessing an animation that foreshadowed the outcome of their fate.
At other times, the actors were doubled through the use of live video in which a
6
The artwork as a staged theatrical presence is based on my readings of Michael Fried’s,
“Art and Objecthood”. He claimed that the minimalists concern with phenomenological questions
of presence and theories surrounding Gestalt psychology still maintained a problem around
presenting an object through theatrics.
shared identity gets confounded between viewing them as “ the different” and
“the same”.
We termed this mixed reality, “the media melt” aesthetic, a convergence of
media projected into a great happening. It was through this experience that I
realized the power of projection, the moment in which an individual’s corporeal
self and a visual representation of that person forms a shared otherness and
participated difference in a theatrical environment that had no specific boundaries
between the audience and the production.
Penumbra uses some of the key devices I experimented with in theater,
specifically the idea of breaking down the fourth wall, Bertold Brecht’s 7 notion of
including the audience as an active participant.
Perceptual Mechanisms and Technological Prosthetics
Creating New Frames for Seeing
Our relationship with technology has been an ongoing investigation in my
works. New conditions produce new ways of seeing. With the advent of
increasing numbers and modes of technological prosthetics in our contemporary
7
Berthold Brecht’s notion of breaking down the fourth wall is a metaphor for diminishing the
boundary between the audience and the stage. Naturalistic plays purport to depict life precisely
as it appears. Thus a typical stage set will look exactly like an ordinary room with one wall (that
nearest the viewer) removed - the fourth wall is the missing one; the first three are those we see.
landscape, the frame8 is becoming more ubiquitous. Our daily routines are
bombarded by framing ourselves in front of the television, the computer, or even
in the minute screen of the telephone. Though our vision has evolved to weave
together a seamless field of coalescing images, our gaze becomes locked into
hypnotic patterns of ensconced reveling. The frame becomes something to
direct. We are all directors to some degree.
From the early explorations in visual perception by Cezanne, Picasso and
Braque, artists of the modern era have grappled with our relationship surrounding
the perception of time and space. As cultural theorists, such as Jonathan Crary
in Techniques of the Observer, have indicated, technological innovations in the
nineteenth century have been pivotal in producing shifting perspectives on
society and new forms of perception.
The scientist Herman Helmholtz led the way in unifying diverse disciplines
and helped develop psychophysics and signal detection theory, a process that
tested perceptual thresholds and legitimized experimental psychology. The
confluence of art, science and philosophy was never more robust. The emphasis
placed on the observer as opposed to the observed changed the discourse in our
relationship to time, space and representation.
My current focus is in understanding how certain tools, apparatuses, and
perceptual devices have changed culture. Apparatuses such as the
phenakistiscope and the cinema become a form of prosthetic that compensate
8
The proliferation of the frame is something new media theorist Lev Manovich explains in his
book, “The Language of New Media”.
for a flawed body and the finitude of human vision. With the vast array of
contemporary tools and the onslaught of the digital revolution, much can come
out of studying how technology has had an effect from a historical perspective.
The codes and systems implemented through technology back in the nineteenth
century are paradoxically not so different than they are today. As Paul Dourish,
author of “Where the Action Is” points out, “computer science is based entirely on
philosophy of the pre-1930s.
Computer science in practice reveals its history as part of a positivist,
reductionist tradition. Similarly, much of contemporary cognitive science9 is
based on rigorous Cartesian separation of mind and matter, cognition and action.
These are philosophical positions of long standing, dating from the nineteenth
century or earlier.10 If we can see various tropes and patterns through our
relationship with history, then perhaps we can gain some insight into our
relationship with current technologies.
Live Video
I have consistently used the medium of live video in my work to explore
the psychological implications of the relationship to our mirror image. There is
something eerie about seeing your double. We can never see our own eyes
9
Cognitive sciences and Consciousness studies have varying philosophical approaches. The
philosophical approach I am alluding to can be seen through the work of Daniel Dennett who
describes the brain as a type of computer. This approach is seen by various scientists as being
to reductivist and centered in the Cartesian separation of mind and matter.
10
Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is : The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (Cambridge, MA
MIT Press, 2004 p. preface
though mirrors become the closest vehicle to do so. In a mirror, you don’t see
yourself as someone else sees you because the image is reversed.
Mirrors are
ubiquitous. We glance at ourselves in front of storefront shops and usually brush
our teeth and comb our hair in front of a mirror on a daily basis. Yet mirrors are
hardly truthful. Like Plato’s cave, the image of oneself and the idea of oneself
are never quite settled.
The nature of observing yourself through live video is different than that of
a mirror. Live video is less familiar so our feedback mechanisms are more
attuned to our movements through the ephemeral quality of video. There is a
strange harmony and dissonance between embodying your image and feeling
separated from it, of being outside yourself. Just as it is unfamiliar to hear your
voice through a recording, it is just as unfamiliar to see your image on a screen.
Time Perception
Philosophers and scientists have long pondered the characteristics and
perception of time from the biological to cognitive perspectives. Time perception
can be changed through very subtle nuances, from an increase or decrease in
body temperature11 to the listening of a familiar song backwards.
Technology has changed our perception of time drastically. From the
photographic studies by Edward Muybridge to the profound influence of the
cinema and video, I am curious in how different media create different
perceptions of time. In his video installation,Quintet of the Astonished (2000), Bill
11
Altered time perceptions due to Temperature decreases in the body is accredited to
Hoagland’s Hypothesis, the notion that a biological clock in the brain regulates the body’s rate of
metabolism, which, in turn, affects perception of the passage of time.
Viola used extremely high-speed film shot at 384 frames a second. He then took
the film and played it back at normal speed exposing the viewer to minute shifts
in affective tonality well beyond what is visible to natural perception. The impetus
for this project was Viola’s fascination in the saturation of emotion in a
photograph of a baby’s face. Viola’s piece is a testament to a cognitive alliance
between machine time and human time, to an affective experience of felt time.
Machine time has seeped into our culture in significant ways. We can
simultaneously send and receive email messages to ourselves and we can
instantaneously navigate between chapters on a DVD. I have attempted to
introduce mixed experiences of time in my work, a confluence of split time, lagtime and real-time. Edwin Hutchins once asked the question, “Why are modern
humans more sophisticated cognitively than cavemen?” His answer was that “it’s
not because we’re smarter, but it’s because we have built smarter environments
in which to function.” My installation is a smart system that has gone haywire;
one that is unfamiliar but which allows for creative actions to decipher how
experienced time is differentiated by real-time and lag-time.
Video Delay
A prominent usage of time in Penumbra is the application of video delay.
Artists such as Dan Graham and Ira Schneider pioneered the effect in the late
1960s and early 1970s. Schneider’s “wipe cycle” uses nine monitors and a live
camera to combine television programs with live circuit video of the viewer to
scramble information in cycles ultimately disorienting the viewer’s intake of
information.
The time-lag of an eight second video delay is the outer limit of the neurophysiological short-term memory that forms an immediate part of our present
perception and affects this from within. If you see your behavior eight seconds
ago presented on a video monitor from outside you will probably therefore not
recognize the distance in time but tend to identify your current perception and
current behavior with the state eight seconds earlier. Since this leads to
inconsistent impressions that you then respond to, you get caught up in a
feedback loop. You feel trapped in a state of observation, in which your selfobservation is subject to some outside visible control. In this manner, you as the
viewer experience yourself as part of a social group of observed observers
instead of, as in the traditional view of art, standing arrested in individual
contemplation before a static object.
Afterimage
Accompanying the use of the video delay in Penumbra is the effect of a
simulated afterimage that changes based on whether the viewer is moving. If a
viewer remains motionless over time, his image will gradually fade out at one
location and gradually reappear directly in front of him. This effect could also
double or potentially triple the viewer’s representation on screen based on the
activity of the viewer. This is to accentuate the experience of retaining multiple
representations of oneself while simultaneously maintaining a relationship with
one’s past that is infused with one’s present.
This correlation between movement and immobility references the
differences between the moving image and the referentiality of photography. As
Mary Ann Doane explains in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, the moving
images are, for the spectator, “here” and “now”. Photography, it would seem, is
theorized as the representation of isolated present moments (which must be
experienced by the spectator as already past), whereas filmic representation
produces the spectatorial experience of presence.”12 I want to impose on the
viewer, the feeling of what it is like to pose for a photograph, as if their image will
be indelibly stained only to disappear through the act of moving again. My
attempt is to blur the boundaries between the experiences of the past and
present with the other’s past and present representations. The result is a not only
a double image of oneself from the past and present, but a double image of
oneself infused with images of others that modulates back and forth depending
on the movements in the space.
Cognitive Mechanisms
Shifting Gazes
12
Mary Ann Doane, “The Emergence of Cinematic Time” Harvard University Press (December
27, 2002) p. 103
Experiencing Penumbra as an individual viewer is quite different than
experiencing the piece with other people. On an individual level, there is an
experience of both voyeurism and surveillance. Other people appear only on
screen and cease to exist in the physical environment. It is as if you are being
watched from behind with the exception that in this context, the figures stand
directly in front of you. The absence of sound13 activates a more intimate
relationship with the ghostly figures as you share a common space on screen
rubbing up against bodies unknown.
Once multiple participants enter the room, a social dynamic of shifting
gazes and shared otherness is experienced. Jacques Lacan once claimed, “you
never look at me from the place I see you.”14 I reposition the direction of the gaze
so that the possibility for looking at others in the space is continuously emerging,
doubling, and modulating between different positions in time and space so that
ultimately, ‘you can look at me from the place I see you.’
One is naturally always tracking one’s own image as a way of aligning
one’s representation with oneself15. There are brief moments however, when this
13
The absence of sound in my installation was a very deliberate decision. According to my
encounter with UMBC neuropsychology professor, Robert Provine; Sound puts us in the place of
people while vision puts us in the place of things. This is why a more robust deaf culture exists
as opposed to a less robust blind culture. By eliminating any sound in my installation, I have
attempted to place the real-time particpants and pre-recorded figures in the same type of space
as objects accentuating the boundary between real and imaginary.
14 Melville, Stephen. ‘Division of the Gaze, or, remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemorary
Theory’. in Vision in Context. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. (op.cit.).
15
The nature of tracking your own representation is quite natural with live video. I want to refer to
Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage, the point in an infant’s life when he may recognize his
“self” in a mirror, and thus achieves consciousness of himself.
suture collapses and the possibility occurs of leaving one’s own body and
entering another occurs.
Mirror Neurons
While Lacan analyzes the psychology of the gaze in relation to the notion
of mimicry, there is another angle for understanding mimicry through a neuroscientific perspective. Recently, the Italian neuro-scientist, Giaccamo Rizzollati
discovered that when a monkey observed another monkey act out some goal
oriented task such as eating, the same neurons in the observing monkey’s brain
would fire than that of the goal oriented monkey. Rizzollati called these neurons
“mirror-neurons” and the implications turned out to be significant. Since this
discovery scientists believe that mirror-neurons can explain how language may
have evolved, how we can “mind read”, how we empathize with others, and how
we imitate the movements of others. As V.S. Ramachandran, a scientist at the
University of California San Diego, explains, “this is why, when you stick your
tongue out at a new born baby it will reciprocate.”16
I believe that artists have been exploring the phenomenon of these
sophisticated imitations through the creation of “interactive” works, art that
examines response mechanisms. Part of my decision to superimpose prerecorded video with live video came from a conversation17 with artist Paul
16
This quote by Ramachandran was heard during his lecture at Columbia University for the
forum on the “Art and the New Biology of the Mind”.
17
My discussion with Paul Demarinas stemmed from a conversation about my piece called
“Musical Chair: A Game for One”, which used multiple video delays to fragment the viewer’s body
Demarinas who talked about the process of developing an interactive work by
observing and documenting various subjects’ interaction with the work. What
seems to take shape is the idea of behavioral form, a continuity that informs how
our cognitive process can be affected by specific routines. From a sociological
perspective, artist Natalie Jeremijenko18 did a study using hidden microphones
and surveillance cameras to compare the way spectators would interact with an
interactive work of art versus a static one. She revealed that there was much
more social interaction amongst strangers with the interactive works than with a
static work.
In my installation, I want to implant documented interactions in order to
suggest a directorial space, a space in which the possibility for imitation is
increased by a pattern of behaviors. After recording various people in the space,
I received several comments that seemed to suggest imitation. One UMBC
student even said that, “everyone seems to cross their arms when they stand
there and I have been doing the same thing.”19
Ambiguous Figures
into a kind of real-time ‘cubistic’ representation of the participant.
18
I learned of Natalie Jeremijenko’s study when she came to UMBC as a visiting artist in the Fall
of 2003.
19
This quote came from a student of mine who volunteered to particpate in what would become
the pre-recorded video for the Installation.
One noticeable device that I implement in my installation is the use of the
cross-fade that blurs representations between phantom figures that exist onscreen and active participants in the room. The effect is a convergence of bodies
seen through a spatial overlapping contingent on how the viewer-participant is
moving around the space. This confluence between mixed representations
creates ambiguities that are often confounding resulting in a suspension of
perceptual stasis. The notion of perceptual suspension is something we
experience at various moments through optical illusions and visual trickeries
when our intellect often fails us and reveals inconsistencies in the brain.
The use of ambiguous figures has been a varied and yet prominent artistic
strategy throughout the history of art. Salvador Dali wrote about the ambiguous
figure in his short manifesto, The Stinking Ass in which he describes the double
image as “the violence of the paranoiac.”
From a neuro-aesthetic perspective, research has provided answers for
why we see ambiguous figures and how we have evolved to perceive such a
peculiar phenomenon that at first glance, appears to harness uncertainty. On the
contrary, a paradox arises in the notion that there is little uncertainty in the
ambiguous figure, only cognitive contingencies feeding off memory and
experience to produce interpretations that are actually absent in the image.
These interpretations do not fluctuate without a cognitive temporal adjustment. In
other words, the ability to see various spatial configurations simultaneously in
something like the Necker Cube (see figure 3) is impossible. We only see one
spatial configuration or the other. British scholar Semir Zeki postulates that upper
level cognitive processes have an evolutionary rationale for which, he claims, is
the inherent survival advantage in the flexibility of interpretation.
I wish to place the viewer in a space in which the differentiation between
others and oneself becomes the interpretive act of breaking down the illusion. It
is in the negotiation between the playful behaviors of the viewer-participant and
the behavioral directed suggestions from the recorded participants on screen that
the viewer-participant learns to accentuate his or her own presence in the space
of the installation.
The way we interpret ambiguities based on memory and selectivity can be
combined with a greater problem, that is, how do we negotiate our attentive
capacities?
Attention versus Distraction
My work explores the intersections between our attentive capacities and
our distractive states or what Walter Benjamin describes as, “reception in the
state of distraction.” Our culture is obsessed with attentive capacities as is
evidenced by pharmaceutical companies who have capitalized on concerns
surrounding attention deficit disorder.
Jonathon Crary, in Suspensions of Perception, explains the impetus for
this obsession with an ideal state of attentiveness. Crary postulates that through
technologies and pre-cinematic entertainment devices, nineteenth century
European culture became obsessed with a perceived breakdown in attention.
These devices became techniques for isolation, cellularization, and separation
causing a diffused attentiveness. Crary claims that, “attention is in crisis because
people can make it it’s own but also becomes open to control and annexation by
external agencies.” Crary’s observation is similar to Heidegger’s reflection on the
role of technology: the more we try to control technology the more it controls us
and infiltrates our existence.
In my installation I want to allude to a private, isolated and attentive space
by creating a system of columns for which to gaze upon the self. In one context,
the experience is existential in that the viewer has some level of attentive control
through the manipulation of the positions of their body movements. When other
viewers enter the space, however, this control is diminished and any sort of
attentiveness of the self becomes jostled by the intrusion of the other. Attention
becomes immobilized and the viewer-participant starts to inhabit time as
disempowered. Pre-recorded video of people that appear and reappear on
screen further accentuates this disruption of the attentive state. Within these
distractions lie increased propensities for the viewer to experience hypnotic and
trance-like states that refocus attention and suspend peripheral awareness.
My objective in Penumbra is to create an experience that places the
viewer in a continuously oscillating mind-space between trance-like states and
social awareness.
Embodied Space and Cinematic Space
Penumbra is both a highly structured and flexible system of shifting
bodies, silhouettes and shadows. It is essentially a ‘blank’ structure20 reminiscent
of Rauschenberg’s white paintings or John Cage’s 4’33.
On one side of the room is a busy projection screen while on the opposite
side is a large, illuminated white wall that acts as a support for the projecting
bodies that resolve themselves into different figural representations according to
the actions of the viewer-participants.
In one context, the space is a theatrical setting used for passively viewing
time-based media. In another context, the space becomes a type of
performance-based theatrical setting, inviting participants to complete the work.
The space is immersive but only if you enter the space to appear on the screen.
When you stand to the side, you become a spectator, observing the opposing
action between on-screen and off-screen activity.
One of the prominent devices used to signify cinematic space is the
projection of pre-recorded figures. My recordings are located somewhere
between surreptitious documentations and directed performances. I was
fascinated by mirroring the museum-viewing experience by recording what
people do when they look at a work of art. They stand around, cross their arms
at times and observe. The purpose of my recordings is not only to mirror the
people in the space of the installation but also to transfer the aura from the art
object to the people as a point of focus.
20
The Blank Structure is also something interactive artist David Rokeby talks about as an
exoskeleton in his essay “Tranforming Mirrors”.
I studied the early films of the Lumiere Brothers who were obsessed with
capturing everyday life in the attempt to trap events and create an indexical
record of time. The pre-recorded video in my installation both becomes an
archived event to observe and immersive content to participate with. The eight
second video delay of oneself only amplifies one’s association with an event from
the past thus deepening the confusion between the archive and present.
Conclusion
In March 2006, Columbia University hosted a forum titled “Art and the New
Biology of the Mind”21 that initiated a dialogue between neuroscientists and
artists on the quest for understanding how we see and respond to art. The
scientists at the forum showed how, through the ages, art consistently reveals
insights about perception and thought processes that substantiate current
scientific research on the mind and brain.
My main criticism at the conclusion of this forum was the exclusion of any
commentary on our relationship to technology and how these devices shape our
cognitive and perceptual capacities. Our environmental conditions and
21
The forum on “Art and the New Biology of the Mind” was held at Columbia University on March
24th, 2006. The forum included Scientists Antonio Damasio, Vittorio Gallese, Raymond Dolan,
Margaret Livingstone, Joseph LeDoux, V.S. Ramachandran, and Semir Zeki. The artists
represented were Richard Meier, David Salle, April Gornick, George Condo, Joan Snyder, Laurie
Anderson, Robert Irwin, Marina Abramovic, Terry Winters, Neil Jenney, Philip Taaffe, and Lynn
Davis.The panel was moderated by Arthur Danto.
technological prosthetics clearly produce new conscious experiences. So, how
do we negotiate between revealing insight into our conscious experience when
our technological prosthetics changes with such rapidity?
It is my hope that the continuation of such collaboration between artists
and scientists will unlock some of these questions. Like all artists, my job is to
churn things up, turn things upside down and possibly create experiences that
scientists can hone onto.
Above all else, Penumbra is an experiment, incorporating juxtapositions
that include real time versus delayed time, constructed narratives versus realtime interactions, the representation of self versus the other and the notion of
embodied space versus disembodied space. It is an experiment exploring these
interstices formally, psychologically and conceptually. My primary goal in this
experiment is to compress these juxtapositions into an installation that opens the
doors into our perceptual and cognitive capacities, to explore and telescope how
this particular experience may question or reflect our daily encounters.
As a visual artist I cannot think of a more stimulating topic than the
act of seeing, but I hope I am successful at balancing this interest with an equally
important concern, which is creating experiences that are compelling enough to
stand on their own without the need for any explanation.
Selected Bibliography
Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage Books,
1990.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
2001
David Rokeby Transforming Mirrors : Subjectivity and Control in Interactive
Media
1996
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
19th Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993
Krauss, Rosalind. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993
Crary Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception Routledge; 2 edition
2002
Hill, Gary. Tall Ships: Gary Hill's Projective Installations Barrytown Limited;
Reprint edition (December 1997)
Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul. Art in Theory 1900-1990 Blackwell Publishing
Ltd 1992
Grau Oliver. Virtual Art : From Illusion to Immersion (Leonardo Books) The MIT
Press, 2004
Popper, Frank . Art, Action and Participation Klincksieck; 2e éd edition (1985)
Dourish, Paul. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction
MIT Press, 2004
Thomas Zummer. Material Light: Jim Campbell
Higgins, Dick. Intermedia. Southern Illinois University Press; Reprint edition
1984
Friedman, Ken. Forty Years of Fluxus, The Fluxus Reader Academy Editions,
John Wiley and Sons, 1998
Hansen, B.N. Mark. The New Philosophy for New Media. MIT Press, 2006
Schiffman, Harvey Richard. Sensation and Perception 5th edition Wiley; 5 edition
2001