HUMAN
2024 Video InstallationThe viewer enters the space and sees 4 monitors stacked on top of each other with a large cctv camera aimed slightly downwards. At first the monitors show a portion of the room, a continuous image, distributed across the vertically stacked screens. The viewer is naturally inclined to take position in front of the monitors within view of the camera. 8 seconds later, they see themself appear on the screen with a corresponding delay. The viewer is confronted with their immediate past in a feedback loop.
Real time behaviour is juxtaposed with an external view of your past behaviour. The conflict this causes in your nervous system, creates the illusion that you see yourself as another would, unable to interact with your own image directly. As you consciously move through the space, the passing of time, which you normally do not perceive, reveals itself.
The work builds on the legacies of Nam June Paik, Dan Graham and Peter Campus in a way that is unafraid to resemble or reenact these ideas because they have kept their relevance and deserve to be experienced 50 years after they were first created. Similar monitors, cameras and other electronics, rearranged into new combinations. The experiments are technical in nature but aim to show processes which are psychological. Like with the artists mentioned, the aim is to ‘show’ a process that is taking place in the viewers mind.
The viewer takes central position in front of the camera becoming the main actor. The time delay causes the individual to disassociate with the image projected across the 4 screens. The installation, consisting of a camera and screens in a vertical composition, impersonates the mobile phone including the standing format now so commonly used on social media to better capture our vertical bodies.
The viewer is trapped in a state of observation not unlike in the digital enclosures of social media where we sculpt online versions of ourselves. A constant feedback loop of filming, being filmed, watching, reacting and engaging with our immediate pasts in a way entirely new to the human experience. An explosion of self consciousness.
