"What are the conditions that make an event possible? Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes."
—Gilles Deleuze >>

<< Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 76.

The current proliferation of digital imagery and technology — from computer-generated graphics, to electronic billboards, to text messaging has significantly blurred the boundaries between art, architecture and film. Our everyday experiences in homes, offices, city streets and leisure spaces have come to be increasingly mediated by an influx of information — information most often manifested in a dizzying array of image-screens. This is perhaps what new media theorist Lev Manovich had in mind when he recently concluded, in a timely update of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, that "we clearly live in the society of the screen." "Screens are everywhere," Manovich observes:

the screens of airline agents, data-entry clerks, secretaries, engineers, doctors and pilots; the screens of ATM machines, supermarket checkouts, automobile dashboards and of course the screens of computers. Rather than disappearing, the screen threatens to take over our offices and homes. Both computer and televisions monitors are getting bigger and flatter; eventually, they will become wall-sized. Architects such as Rem Koolhaas design Blade Runner like buildings whose facades have been transformed into giant screens. >>

<< Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001), p.114.

Doug Aitken in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Interiors, 2002, 3 channel video projection, Dimensions vary with installation, Collection of the Fabric Workshop and Museum

Given the ubiquity of the screen, the question now appears to be less about its sheer quantity than discerning its different modes of address, and its capacity to reshape our perceptual habits. While digital technology has allowed artists, architects and designers to exert greater control in constructing and manipulating imagery, it has also, paradoxically, rendered the tactile and spatial dimension of images increasingly difficult to grasp. Perhaps more importantly, the digital turn signals a shift in the traditional relationship between image and screen, one that has persisted throughout centuries of art and cinema and that supposes the screen as a static, flat and immaterial surface — a surface whose only raison d'étre is a function of the illusionary "deep space" of the imagery it sponsors. Recent practices in contemporary art suggest that while images have become increasingly virtual, malleable and non-referential, the "screen" itself has undergone a reciprocal transformation; its materiality activated, its boundaries loosened. Bypassing the simple dichotomy between surface and depth, the artists in this exhibition are linked by a shared interest in exploring the reciprocities, continuities and disjunctions between image and screen that put the very definition and distinction of these terms into question.

An entirely different definition of surface derives from the study of physics, and it is this material and contingent concept of surface which provides an alternate way of thinking about recent projected image practices outside of the historically overdetermined notion of the screen. In physics, surface tension refers to the dynamic activity that binds adjacent liquid molecules together; it describes, in other words, the propensity for a liquid substance to behave like a trampoline. The cohesive forces between liquid molecules at the edge of a group of molecules exert a surface tension, a kind of provisional surface or skin. This tension renders the surface molecules more elastic than those below and is what, for example, enables small insects to walk on water because their weight is not enough to penetrate the surface.

"Everything About: Water Strider," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Taken broadly, this phenomenon provides an analogy for the particular interface between image and screen in the exhibition Surface Tension, in so far as it identifies a fundamental contingency of form, both internal and external, that is reliant upon heterogeneous materials set in relation to one another in a specific context. The basic mechanics of image projection require a surface of some kind to capture light and render the image visible. There must, then, be some resistance between the material of the screen and the materiality of the image (light). However in the art works in Surface Tension, this notion of the distinct materiality of image and screen is elusive. The structure or form of what we can think of as the surface of the screen is permeated, even saturated by the image. The image inhabits both the internal and external structure of the screen. The screen no longer simply presents the image; rather the artwork derives its meaning from an actively interdependent relationship between image and screen, between form and content.

Bill Viola, The Veiling, 1995, Video sound installation, including two channels of color video projections from opposite sides of dark gallery through nine scrims suspended from the ceiling, two channels of amplified mono sound, and four speakers, 138 x 264 x 372 inches, Private Collection

To consider the screen as a "fold" instead of a discrete surface entails acknowledging its materiality while at the same time collapsing its absolute difference with the projected image. Clear distinctions between surface and depth, or between inside and outside no longer hold, since surface or inside is but a creased section of its opposite. Via Deleuze, we can begin to think of the screen as a site of transference or overlap — a contact zone with forces pushing against either side of it, where light, space, matter and information are temporarily cinched together. Architectural historian and theorist, Anthony Viddler addresses the multidimensional aspect of the Deleuzian notion of the Fold in the following way:

folds are manifested in 'pleats of matter' is not simply to refer to a crease in a piece of cloth; matter is, in these terms, every where, in the void as well as in the solid and subject to the same forces. Folds then exist in space and in time, in things and in ideas, and among their unique properties is the ability to join all these levels and categories at the same moment. >>

<< Anthony Vidler, Warped Space (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 200), p. 219.

Peter Rose in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Pneumenon, 2003, Video and sound installation with fabric screen and fan, Installation dimensions vary, fabric screen approximately 135 x 102 inches, Collection of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Running time: 5 minutes

Peter Rose

However abstract, Deleuze's conception of the Fold as "pleats of matter" evokes the literal material of fabric. As an artist in residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM), Peter Rose was drawn to the malleable, fluid or folding capacities of fabric as an alternative "surface" for image projection. The FWM has a history of collaborating with video artists like Bill Viola and Doug Aitken, whose residency projects experimented with fabric as a surface that is at once transparent and sufficiently opaque to capture a projected image. In keeping with this history, Surface Tension meshes with the larger mission of the FWM, one that is centered around innovative and expansive potentiality of artistic materials. Like Viola and Aitken before him, Rose's new project tests the formal and perceptual limits of the screen, by exploring the sculptural and architectural aspects of video projection. Indeed, for Rose, it is precisely the material qualities of fabric, not least its tendency to fold, that allows for such a multidimensional approach.

Deleuze, p. 31. >>

Deleuze has written that "the fold is inseparable from wind," that it is "ventilated by the fan." << Rose's new video installation, Pneumenon consists of two projected video images; one is a rear projection of a blue plastic tarp on to a silk fabric screen the other is projected on to a wall behind the screen. A fan, aimed obliquely at the screen, intermittently blows against the fabric, causing it to ripple and waver, uncannily mimicking the video imagery of the tarp blowing in the wind. The activation of the fan and the flow of air through the installation are synchronized according to two videos. When the video image of the tarp falls flat, the shadow of a tree is reflected on to its blue plastic surface; however as the wind blows, the tarp flies up revealing the actual tree situated in an idyllic natural setting of a campground, thus providing a context for the real tree casting the shadow. As the silk fabric hanging in the gallery blows upwards it briefly reveals the second projected image on the back wall. Echoing the imagery of the first projection, this video segment, although significantly more manipulated, also depicts a tree. Rose refers to this image as the Ur Tree or the Platonic Tree: the tree that precedes all subsequent examples of "treeness."

By way of multiple echoes and spatial layering Pneumenon, disturbs the surface of the video projection, conflating spaces both real and virtual and rendering the boundaries of the image elusive. The screen becomes a rippling plane that only momentarily provides a surface to sponsor the image. In keeping with Rose's longstanding interests in challenging traditional techniques of cinematic immersion, the screen, dislodged from the coordinates of the wall, insinuates a series of folds within the visual field. This frustrates our desire to give ourselves over to the space of the projected image by drawing us in and out of that imaginary space, back and forth between surface and depth, between reality and illusion. Rose acknowledges our desire to immerse ourselves in the space of the image, in the imaginary, but no sooner are we drawn into the illusion of it — then it is disrupted, "blown" away. Our perception of surface and depth moves beyond the space of the image itself, tipping into the actual gallery as the screen itself mimics the movement of the tarp in the image, as if breaking through the surface of the screen. In Pneumenon, the space of the image unfolds onto the surface of the screen itself. Rose deliberately creates an illusion of depth only to break it, and restore it, through the unpredictable flow of wind. In his own words, he questions "how can it matter that one was there, that an image was made by virtue of one's physical presence in a context, rather than by the simulation of such?" Rose's billowing screen manifests the experience of slipping between the real and the imaginary, and reveals a suspicion at the heart of his project: his doubt that experience, that actual presence in a particular time and place holds any kind of value in this digital age.

Tony Oursler

That we are constantly communicating, perceiving, and experiencing the world through media devices has been a driving topic at the heart Tony Oursler's work for decades. Wavefront is part of a body of work in which Oursler interviewed and studied a group of people who believed they could use technology to commune with the dead. He came across a family of spiritualists from the 19th century who claimed to communicate with the dead by using Morse Code to knock on walls and interpret responsive knocking sounds. The concept of knocking for Oursler is about a transfer of energy from the hand to medium, "a transformation from vibration to sound, from flesh to thought." This is a rudimentary technological transfer of waves of information, of life, "through mediums." >> Oursler's research reveals a longstanding interest in reigning in unseen or alternate frequencies.

<< Tony Oursler, Smoke and Mirrors: Tony Oursler's Influence Machine: A Conversation between Tony Oursler and Louise Neri, New York City, May-July 2001.

Click to visit site.

Tony Oursler, Wavefront, 2001, Video projector, DVD player, DVD, metal, Plexiglas, 89 1/2 x 79 x 67 1/2 inches, Courtesy Metro Pictures Gallery, New York

Wavefront is largely sculptural, comprised of a TV antennae-like structure. Oursler consciously references the TV antennae, signaling our reliance on technology to capture invisible waves and translate them into visible information. Because cable TV, and all of its new high tech variants, has made the antenna an almost obsolete technology, it conjures a nostalgic sense of a more concrete or tactile relationship to technology and telecommunication that once existed. Oursler seems drawn to the antenna for this very reason.

"When I bought the antennas I noticed manufacturers gave them names like 'ghost killer,' to advertise how they fixed blurry reception. For me, the idea that an object could transform what's invisible — waves in the air, electronic signals — into something visible was interesting, not just because of the spiritualists but because it seemed a metaphor for art: making visible an intangible sensation. I like the utilitarian beauty of an antenna, too, the 1950's sci-fi connotation, and the fact that the design is figurative: like an arm grabbing information from air." >>

<< Tony Oursler, Smoke and Mirrors: Tony Oursler's Influence Machine: A Conversation between Tony Oursler and Louise Neri, New York City, May-July 2001.

Click to visit site.

The multifaceted surfaces of this structure catch sections of the image on different planes leaving gaps in the image. Because the Plexiglas panels are transparent, the entire image also appears projected on the wall behind the structure, however distorted, in different colors and expanded due to the distance of the wall and the filter of the colored panels. It is a total image that does not have a single focal point, it shifts and moves in various directions, floating, and moving between surfaces; the antennae, the plastic shards and the wall itself.

This dispersal of the image corresponds on a formal level to the disembodied haunting faces and voices of Oursler's protagonists. As viewing subjects we become complicit in their endeavors; as we follow their floating faces, we acknowledge their presence as they confirm ours. Oursler always keeps us aware of our own presence in front of these images. The faces address us, they speak to us, and they draw us into their trance-like state. The sculpture becomes the surface that mediates between the ghostlike and nonmaterial. Like the door that reverberates the sound of the knock, the structure is in essence the surface that catches the waves of the image, the energy of the light, bouncing that energy back out at us. As the imagery and sounds are strangely fragmented and vacant, they call attention to the contrasting weighty mass of our own bodies, to our own physical presence. As viewing subjects, we too become a surface. Our physical presence is required to act as a surface to receive the mediation. Oursler thus creates a kind of circuit, among and between these various surfaces, probelmatizing the boundaries of each.

Nicole Cohen

Nicole Cohen's work combines the projected image with still photography to explore the subtle ways that particular interior spaces affect psychological states and social constructions of behavior. In Jet Lag, Cohen projects video footage of the interactions between three anonymous people onto two color photographs of the interior of a luxury private jet, The photographs depict two different spaces inside the jet, one a public lounge, the other a semi-private bedroom space, both designed with slick, stream-lined modernist surfaces, decorated in muted earth tones of brown and beige. Although the two rooms are clearly part of the same interior, it is difficult to determine if they are adjacent, and it becomes immediately apparent that they cannot be oriented spatially: while the photographs are mounted side by side, the deep space they depict recedes along a perpendicular axis. As the actors inhabit the space, doing various activities to occupy themselves (talking, drinking, playing jacks, doing yoga), they move back and forth from one screen to the other, from one space to the next, creating a delay, deferral or lag in the flow of the filmic narrative.

Superimposing the video footage over the still photo creates a single hybrid image that is visually cohesive yet cognitively askew. As the viewer struggles to reconcile the two layers, to map the actions of one space onto the other, the disjunctions between the two layers keeps the overall image from shifting into sharp focus. Cohen has crafted a double disjunction, the first between the projected and the still image, the second a narrative disjunction conditioned by the structural doubling of the two photograph as screens. Playing on the viewer's intuitive desire to bind these disparate layers, and to follow fluid imagery from one screen/space to the next, Cohen deliberately forces the footage to stumble, to get snagged between adjacent screens and spaces.

Nicole Cohen, Appropriated photographs used in Jet Lag, 2003, 5 1/2 x 8 inches

Cohen engages with the voyeuristic history of the cinematic medium as a way to explore the behavior of her subjects. Rather than reserving this experience solely for the viewer, though, Cohen establishes a set of loose rules or parameters for her actor/subjects to operate within, as if in a controlled sociological experiment: The artist sets a stage for her performers to act within, setting up the video studio to mimic the space of the interior of the jet. Once this stage is set, Cohen's protagonists are free to act according to their own imagination, to inhabit the space and interact freely, all the while being recorded by the camera. In this way, Cohen interrogates the voyeuristic gaze of cinema imminently, within the actual time-space of the video by linking it to experiments in performativity. She is interested in foregrounding the anxiety and heightened self consciousness that the camera inevitably provokes: the peculiar ways that people act when they know they're being filmed. There are, then, layers of voyeurism, woven into the layering of the imagery that reference certain institutional power structures: the plane, the frame, the camera; each exerting a disparate but imperfect mode control over the image.

The small scale of the images evokes the sense of confinement one feels in the compressed space of an airplane. On a plane movement is restricted, passengers are forced to remain with in proscribed space. Jet Lag exacerbates this tension by creating a parallel tension between the projected image and the space of the photograph. That the action in Cohen's work is on a loop reinforces this idea of confinement, in a sense the action is also confined, destined to repeat itself within the closed circuit of the video.

Jim Campbell

Also employing the trope of the video loop, Jim Campbell's Ambiguous Icons reveal the technology at work behind the digital images and computer screens that transfix us. In a body of work he calls Ambiguous Icons, he explores the relationship between digital information and its reception. Through the fairly new technology of the LED screen, Campbell compresses the millions of pixels in a digital video image to a reduced amount of information. Comprised essentially of a grid of bulbs that emit varying degrees of red light and color, images appear shadowy and even slightly fragmented, or pixilated. Campbell has emphasized and essentialized the digital pixel, treating it as a discrete formal element

Memory and the screen image are key concepts underlying Campbell's work, which as in Cohen's work, addresses the questions of memory and psychological behavior. Jim Campbell's Running and Falling is set at the beach and captures a brief moment in which a figure runs in a circle, falls, brushes himself off and then starts running again. The clip repeats itself in a short a loop, keeping the figure in perpetual repetitive motion and evoking a kind of futile sense of Sisyphus-like determination. The figure runs in a circle around the camera which traces this movement from a fixed point in the center of the circle. Set on the beach, the horizon is visible in the background, however it is the moving figure that retains our focus in the foreground.

Ambiguous Icon #5 (Running, Falling), 2000, Custom electronics, 768 LEDs, 22 x 29 inches, Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchased with funds from the Contemporary Committee, 2001.128

That the entire work is only 28 x 22 inches and is hung on the wall like a painting, not only references the history of depicting illusionistic space, but in fact suggests a direct trajectory from the painting to the computer screen. The bound coordinates of the picture frame defining illusionistic depth can be traced back to Alberiti's perspectival theories and 15th century Renaissance paintings. Campbell references this history by giving his work a rectangular shape and a definite status as an art object, to be hung on the wall by a wire that is strung across its back, just like a painting. However while paintings, cinema screens, and computer monitors all rely on this same framed window of illusionistic deep space, it is precisely this notion of a window as a planar boundary that separates foreground and background and establishes depth beyond a surface that Campbell challenges. His screen does depict illusionistic space, yet he also disrupts the solid, smooth frontal plane of such surfaces. The physical presence of the LED bulbs, not hidden beneath the screen's surface, push forward in space and exert a three dimensional presence. In viewing Campbell's work one cannot help but notice the physical hardware, the many individual red bulbs that flash and pulsate, each one programmed to emit light at a precisely defined rate and duration.

In this way, Campbell's work relies on the concrete technology of the screen and he actualizes this technology for viewers to see. Seen from up close, the image is difficult to make out, it is dispersed, fragmented, and divided into small visual representations of digital information. No one smooth surface holds the image, instead a series of lights form a cohesive image only in our mind's eye. Campbell, a kind of contemporary Seurat, has studied the process through which the eye takes in and processes visual information. The magnified and pared down pixilated quality of Campbell's imagery relies upon the fact that the human eye will instinctively compensate for gaps in the visual field. We can receive only part of a visual image and yet comprehend subtle aspects of the image as it moves and morphs.

Through his exploration of digital information, perception, and interpretation, Campbell establishes a conscious dynamic between the viewer and the screen, making viewers aware of how their own subjective interpretations, are fused with memory and rooted in the very complex social relationship that we now have to contemporary media and digital technology. By drawing out the mechanisms of the digital image and reminding viewers of the subjective role they play in interpreting imagery, Campbell gives his audience agency with relationship to the digital image. The moving image is not longer simply a surface to watch passively, but a screen that demands an active level of participation.

Camille Utterback

Camille Utterback’s artworks solicit an even greater degree of viewer interaction, creating a situational aesthetic in which the viewer’s physical participation is necessary to “activate” and complete the artwork. Utterback’s expertise in new media technology, (including her ability to write her own programs), has allowed her to maximized the malleability of the digital image and build in a nearly infinite set of visual variations. While Campbell’s work focuses on optical perception and memory in order to highlight the mechanisms of interpretation, Utterback has developed her own interactive technology that explores the relationship between the viewer’s body and the materiality of the video screen.

In Liquid Time, as viewers navigate the space of the installation (delineated by a painted rectangle on the gallery floor), their movements are tracked by an overhead surveillance camera, which is linked to a computer. The recorded footage is fed through the computer and instantly translated into corresponding units of video footage that move forward or backward in time. The abstracted "real time" of the viewer's motions are registered on the video screen depicting a color-saturated images of Tokyo street scenes (such as people holding colorful umbrellas while crossing a rain-soaked street, or bold neon billboards in a busy intersection) that become fractured, refracted, and abstracted in time according to the viewer's movements in the gallery space.

Camille Utterback, Liquid Time, 2001, Interactive installation, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist, New York

Gilles Deleuze, "Doubts About The Imaginary," Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) p.65, originally published in Hors-cadre 4, (1986). >>

The particular behavior of Utterback's screen is created by her reconfiguration of the playback structure of digital video. In digital video, as in film, video frames can be thought of as layered one in front of the next, each layer representing a fraction of a second. Like a child's "flip book" comprising numerous discrete still pictures, these multiple layers blend together in rapid succession to yield a single moving image. The layers themselves are made up of millions of individual pixels, which can be manipulated and controlled using various editing and digital imaging programs. For Liquid Time, Utterback has written software that plays back imagery in sections smaller than the original digital video frames. Each frame is divided into vertical bands five pixels wide which can move forwards or backwards independently of each other. (Imagine that each page of the flip book has been razored into a set of individually flipable strips.)  Isolating linked chains of pixels in such a way permits a small fraction of the image to behave as a distinct unit within the overall image creating a non-synchronous series of slivers. Utterback takes the additional step of hinging the behavior of these strips to the motions of viewers' bodies in the installation space. The resulting fusion creates an image that jumps ahead of itself in some areas and remains strangely static in others. Liquid Time thus illustrates Deleuze's simple but profound claim that, cinema "makes motion depend on time" <<

Typically in the cinema the viewer remains stationary, and the film itself moves. Utterback's work completely upsets the dynamic of a passive spectator, trapped in a fixed position in front of the screen, the container of motion. Instead, Utterback re-programs a relationship of reciprocity, the image moving in relation to us as we move in relation to the image. At the same time, even though the viewer exerts a degree of control over the image it is not in a reflective recognizable way: instead, Utterback makes the body's trajectory visible in the form of a non-representational trace without ever permitting it to enter the scene.

This notion of reciprocity and interactivity demonstrates how computing and digital imaging overturns the traditional singular point of view. In Liquid Time, distance and perspective are initially reconceived as temporal, rather than merely spatial, coordinates, only to reemerge onto the plane of visual space—the surface of the image. Moving beyond a single-point perspective Utterback creates a multiplicity of temporal perspectives that divides and protracts a single perceptual moment. By creates multiple points of view within one screen/ surface, Utterback makes visible an idea of surface that is simultaneously cohesive and heterogeneous in time.

Nadia Hironaka

Utterback's slivered screen opens onto a seemingly infinite terrain within the space of the projected image. The depiction of such small increments of time simultaneously results in a changing representation of space. Nadia Hironaka's My Stars is no less concerned with the opening up of spaces, both actual and virtual. Her newly redesigned installation brings together two video works National and International that explore/mine two vacant architectural spaces. Absent any human protagonists, the monumental buildings are the unlikely stars of Hironaka's videos.

The first video, subtitled National, documents the interior of Philadelphia's landmark Modernist National Product's building. Now deserted, Hironaka's camera traverses its corridors, uncovering vacant offices that the artist has constructed to appear as if its inhabitants fled suddenly leaving behind open drawers and cabinets, boxes packed with paper work, and once fashionable modernist furniture. From one space to the next the camera fixes on bizarre and seemingly forgotten and slightly ominous scenes: a restroom trash bin overflowing with paper towels; a pile of brightly colored futon mattresses. The second video, subtitled International, was filmed inside the equally monumental Fabrica building designed by Tadao Andono, situated outside Treviso in Northern Italy. Though far from derelict, this building is no less vacant than its Philadelphia counterpart, inhabited only by anonymous caretakers who maintain its polished finish. Hironaka's camera follows the building's contours, tracing the vertical plains of white walls and the repeating rectangles of a slightly spiraling staircase. Probing the space as if searching for some lingering trace of human presence, the lens gleans only subtle shadows and patterns of light filtered through the building's geometric architectural forms.

Nadia Hironaka, Still from International, 2003, Courtesy of the artist, Philadelphia

The installation embeds these video works within a tableau that consists of a wall painting, two star-shaped incisions in the surface of the gallery wall and two star-shaped mirrored kaleidoscopic structures that form a bridge between the surface of the gallery wall and two monitors that present the videos recessed within the wall. The star-shaped cuts are situated among other silver painted stars in the design of the wall painting. As if depicting the horizontal movement of shooting stars, brightly colored bands extend from not only the painted stars but also from the cut out stars and the moving imagery of the kaleidoscopic screen. From inside the gallery wall, the mirrored planes of the kaleidoscope infinitely morph the geometric forms and colors depicted in the videos. These forms and colors seem to spill out onto the surface of the gallery wall in such a way that architectural space becomes a no less malleable formal element than digital video. The wall painting even further emphasizes the shifts between planes of surface and depth, because it establishes a flat static surface that provides a contrast to the dynamic active moving imagery within the wall.

The distorting lens of the kaleidoscopes results in a visual experience of endlessly unfolding spaces. Reflected and refracted off the mirrored plains, surfaces/shapes seem to constantly un/fold into depth, and any notion of a "point of view" as constructed by the camera is fractured beyond recognition. One might say that Hironaka fractures the "screen-as-eye" to reveal the underlying heterogeneity of the moving image, a phenomenon, as Deleuze describes it, is "made up of breaks and disproportions, deprived of all centers, addressing itself as such to viewers who are no longer the center of their own perception." >>

<< Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, p. 37

For Deleuze, the camera is not an instrument that is continuous with the human eye: it is, rather, an artificial mode of perception that transcends the limits of ordinary seeing. By contrast, it is the screen that functions as a surrogate eye, processing the plurality of visual data as image. "The eye isn't the camera," Deleuze writes, "it's the screen. As for the camera, with all its propositional functions it's a sort of third eye, the minds eye." >> As Hironaka's camera navigates these deserted spaces in real-time, it is constantly interrupted by rapidly edited sequences — flash-backs or visual memories of preceding rooms and architectural forms — flashes of what Deleuze calls the mind's eye.

<< Deleuze, 54

Hironaka uses audio and visual editing techniques not only to further the play of surface and depth, but also to reference memory and cinematic history. In both video works, Hironaka repeats and remixes sound bytes from historic Hollywood films to trope the cinematic convention of setting a tone through a soundtrack. Sounds, some gleaned from 60's sci-fi films, such as: footsteps, clicks, white noise, and other abstract mechanical sounds, provide an aural echo of Hironka's video editing. This coordinated sense of visual and aural rhythm establishes a keen sense of texture that contributes significantly to the overall tone of the work. In the realm of the visual, Hironaka's explicit use of digital editing further emphasizes a very conscious construction of framing, often taking advantage of digital editing technology to frame one shot inside of another, or position two images of architectural spaces side by side within one framed shot. In a sense the entire work is a constantly repeating process of framing and reframing,

Lighting for Urban Rooftop Environments (street-level view of an outdoor projection event featuring David Guinn, Between Two Fires, 2002)

Lighting for Urban Rooftop Environments (LURE)

The spatiality of the screen and the relationship between architectural and virtual space is at the crux of each of the projects produced by Lighting for Urban Rooftop Environments [LURE]. Comprising multiple sites and artists, the LURE project for Surface Tension, entitled Not In Service, features five individual screen savers by David Guinn, Richard Harrod, Olivia Schreiner, Julianne Swartz, Mika Tajima that will be projected onto a nearby rooftop adjacent to the FWM on the evening of September 5 2003, directly following the opening reception of Surface Tension. The Not In Service screen savers incorporate imagery and sound and are available to be downloaded from LURE's website at www.lureprojects.org.

Visually playful, and infinitely repeatable, the screen saver is an inherently self referential form — the chosen activity of the computer when it has been left to its own devices. Like an unconscious memory, it emerges when our attention has drifted from the computer/screen only to disappear once we engage it. The ephemeral nature of the screen-saver suggests a more commonplace, everyday experience of the moving image — one more indebted to the visual vocabulary of cartoons, etch-a-sketch and doodling in the margins of the page. Screen-savers do not aspire to a fine-art status: instead, they are a medium of distraction, an allegory of down-time that intercedes between bouts of focused concentration and interaction with the computer.

At the same time, the emergence of digital design and the increasing tendency for architectural modeling to be worked out on the computer screen endows these graphics with an unlikely permanence. Is it any coincidence that the majority of early screen savers depict construction imagery; pipes, branching out and connecting to other pipes, climbing higher and gradually filling up the screen? Or that Tetris, one of the more popular computer games of all time challenges us to out-race the rapid stacking of building blocks, before they blot out our view of the screen? With the majority of architectural and design firms now making use of CATIA (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application) before turning to the small-scale mock-up, the realm of the digital has become the chosen local to model architectural space.

LURE's screen saver project draws out the affinities between architectural and virtual space by taking the massive structure of the urban high-rise building as a temporary site to view the projected image. By projecting moving imagery onto an architectural façade the building acquires a rippling fluidity similar to that of the screen. Transforming the physical location into a more permeable surface, the LURE projections challenge the age-old dichotomy between surface and structure.

LURE events always take place take place in exterior urban locations, often on a rooftop. This open-air public space diverges from the hermetic environment of the white cube museum gallery. This rooftop locale is one that allows for a certain privileged intimacy in the viewing experience (only for those that are actually permitted on the rooftop) as well as a simultaneously public and unexpected/spontaneous viewing dynamic (for those passersby who happen to catch the projection from the street below). The rooftop offers an unusual perspective on the urban environment itself. With a 360 degree view of the city around you, and the vastness of the sky above, on the rooftop it becomes impossible to forget your location: location in fact is everything.

The LURE projections reveal a reciprocal relationship between the projected image and the building itself: on one hand the building acts as a kind of frame, providing a spatial context to view the image, while on the other hand, the grooves and nooks of the building's exterior are insinuated into the image. This formal reciprocity extends to the temporal dynamic between the concrete permanence of the built environment and the project's virtual status as the screen saver exists in the two temporal spaces simultaneously. However, in this exterior more performative instance of the exterior projection the work has a fleeting existence, while it exists repeatedly, even infinitely in the realm of the virtual. In its multiplicitous forms LURE's project exists both internally, within the immaterial vastness of virtual space, and externally in its permutation as a projection on a building.

Copyright © 2003, The Fabric Workshop and Museum. All rights reserved.