UNI [THESIS] – INSTALLATION REVIEW

July 12th, 2009 | Richard Almond

This installation generally proved a useful and enjoyable exploration of my thesis topic. I have studied the metaphors of decay and memory and attempted to blur the boundaries in their definitions between the physical world and the digital. The patch began with a live camera feed being projected onto a screen. This in itself attracted a lot of interaction, being rear-projected, the feed offered a true depiction of the room and its occupants, rather than the mirror-image most are used to. Upon a visitor entering the room, a short recording was triggered. These recordings started to be fed randomly back into the projection, overlaying the live feed. It soon became confusing as to who was actually in the room and who was a previous occupant, a memory of the past. The effect was most powerful when a previous memory of the current occupant appeared. Visitors found it particularly exciting to share a space with a previous version of themselves.

Depending on the length of the installation, either every 1 hour or every 10 minutes, a new series of presets were triggered which progressively decayed the live feed. Effects were initially very subtle, simply glitching certain colours within the live feed, but moved on to drawing trails of the moving edges of an object or visitor, before eventually blending pixels into a surreal blur. Recordings were taken after the data moshing process within the patch, and so the recordings themselves were decayed. This meant that in the latter stages of the installation, the decayed live feed was overlaid with decayed recordings, leading to a doubly-decayed result. An unforeseen but enjoyable outcome was that in the latter stages, since a recording is chosen at random from the pool, there would occasionally be a memory from the very start of the installation overlaid into the feed. This recording of course had been only very subtly decayed, so visitors were periodically allowed just glimpse of reality. In the final stage, the user can no longer make out themselves as a current occupant of the space, the feed has become so decayed that they simply manipulate the pixels with their movement, pushing and pulling colour around the screen. They begin to be able to actively decay the memories of the previous occupants that they are being shown.

It soon became evident that the initially planned 6-day long version of the installation was simply too lengthly for something that is intended to be purposefully visited, and that the 1 day and 1 hour long versions were a lot more suitable. I found that visitors expected to see the results of their actions in real time. The average visit was maybe 2-3 minutes, but the shorter the overall length of the installation, the longer each visit tended to be. I feel that this is due to the immediate feedback available in the shorter versions, visitors quickly see results, they see themselves alongside previous occupants, and often even alongside a version of themselves from only a few minutes ago.

I experienced a range of technical difficulties throughout the week of experimentation. The patch itself behaved rather temperamentally, seemingly possessing a mind of its own and producing completely different results on different days. The main problem however was that of lighting, which required a very fine balance between providing enough so as to allow the distortion effect to work properly, but not too much as to wash out the projection screen. Using a series of small lamps with shields I managed to achieve an acceptable arrangement after much trial and error, but this patch would run much better on a large TV screen. The difficulty with this approach is that there is an element of poetry and depth in projecting the results, as one can choose the surface onto which to project, something showing the signs of physical decay inevitably add another level of interest. There were also problems with the storage of the recorded files, which were very memory intensive. Retrospectively, more time would have been spent finding a suitable codec to compress the file sizes without the loss of too much quality, allowing the installation to run without the need for an external hard disk. A firewire camera may have also helped speed up the general running of the patch.

This piece remains a semi-proposal, as regrettably there was not enough time to set up a user-submitted web feed of images into the installation. The idea of users being able to add to the installation from their computers or mobile phones would add yet another level of complexity to the system, and this would definitely be a consideration for future experimentation. Through this experimentation, however, I also discovered the appeal of the installation in a public place, and in particular one containing large amount of passing people. I did some testing in a corridor/room space which saw people frequently move through, and this was particularly successful. When people are unaware of the installation and not expecting to be recorded they tend to respond well. Any run of the installation which lasts more than 6 hours or so almost certainly needs to be something people passively engage with, something in a public space, rather than something which people are invited to actively visit and interact with. There is a definite possibility in using this in a venue such as a bar or club.

Experimentation with props during the installation was compelling, and this is something I would enjoy exploring further. In particular I would like to experiment with graphics, exposing words and signs during the recording process which could build up a potentially poetically random set of memories. I relate this back to “The Art of Memory” by Frances Yates, and the ancient view that there are two types of memory: that of words and that of things.