Dis-location
Type: Exhibition / Newport Museum & Art Gallery
Materials: Glass / video / Audio
Dis-Location, an installation that creates a multisensory space in a completely dark environment. This space beyond time creates a very real sense of disorientation and invites visitors to analyse and perhaps re-evaluate their self-perceptions. Using PRIVA-LITE technology from QUANTUM GLASSTM the piece incorporates video created by the artist and Pete Telfer that effectively animate the glass walls as they change state.
Its specific starting point is the use of images to distance ourselves from the concept of mortality. But it achieves its effect of dislocation through the combination of the visual and audio elements used to create the piece, in which, having entered its environment, the viewer becomes a participant.
Audible and sensitive, voices and other ambient sounds – some close, some distant – alter individual perceptions of the size of the installation. This tension is enhanced by the use of multiple flat screens produced using QUANTUM GLASSTM active glass, which are suspended at varying heights and orientations within the space. Ranging in size from 7” to 50”, they are used to display video images against a totally black background. The changing size of the on-screen images challenges our normal understanding of spatial perspective. Making direct reference to the linear and continuous way in which we normally approach the concept of time, these images of children, adults and elderly walk and jump from the edge of the screen only to appear a little later on another screen, where they continue their actions and activities.
Viewers are also active participants in the installation, since they are also projected on one of the screens embodied in real-time within roles other than that of a spectator distanced from the art piece and what it has to say. Each viewer therefore becomes another member of the on-screen population, and understands that watching is not everything; that the transition to the digital world involves losses as well as gains. The digital representation of each viewer therefore becomes a constituent part of the whole, raising new questions about space, time and other sensory aspects of existence.
