Spatiodynamic

interactive installation, 2003

The viewer is first confronted with a small screen inset into the gallery wall. On the screen there is a land/seascape of indeterminable size that either seems to be approaching the viewer or the viewer is flying forward over it. Then proceeding around a corner, the machinations of the image are revealed. A large grid-work platform twenty-one feet (7meters) long and ten feet (3.2 meters) wide is suspended four feet (1.3 meters) above the floor. The surface of the platform has been covered loosely with a sheet of thin plastic. Formations in the plastic are rising, falling and moving from one end of the platform to the other where a camera sits gathering the real-time video for the small screen. The formations are caused by a grid work of two hundred and twenty 4-inch computer fans blowing upwards from under the plastic. Upon further investigation the viewer can see a second screen with another live camera feed from a second hidden camera looking at people moving through the original space with the small inset screen and how their position and motion determines the formations of the land/seascapes through on and off operation of the fans.

It is important that there be a separation between the space where the machine makes the image, and the space where the viewer affects the machine. Unlike the usual mode of experience, the viewer is allowed to see how the illusion is made and how they participate in that illusion. They cannot directly control the machine because of the separation of the two spaces; much like our regular experience we can only see mediated shadows of our existence mirrored on the screen. The interaction is passive and almost inconspicuous. Our data is collected from hundreds of sources each day, through electronic transactions, cell phone calls and the hours of our lives taped from surveillance cameras. Here some of that very same data is put to use by translation into a mystery of form and movement on a screen. Even without the viewer understanding that the patterns are generated from their past spatial existence, there is a certain sense of enlightenment when rounding the corner to see the fans and plastic in action. Spatiodynamic moves the viewer from a fixed one-point perspective, two-dimensional representation, to a space where a myriad of perspectives bring new understanding about the landscape presented to us. It is no longer of indeterminable size, no longer extends into infinity where new resources and discoveries lie waiting to be claimed. It is limited space, controlled and manipulated. It is a Cartesian grid where digital binary information uses the chaotic nature of air to transfer the information into an organically/naturally shaped surface.