Information
Christopher Salter >
»M2«, 1998
Co-Workers & Funding:
Concept: SpongeProject Development and Construction: Chris Salter, Laura Farabough, Sha Xin Wei
Audio-Visual Material: Chris Salter, Laura Farabough
Produced by Sponge with the Assistance of the LAB (Topological Media Lab)
http://www.chrissalter.com/projects.php#M2
Technology
Installation Requirements / Space
a six-room walk-through architectural/media environmentMaterial
screen, TV, heat lamps, audio system,
Descriptions & Essays
Overall, the event is cyclical; however, the groups spend variable amounts of time going through the chambers. The immersion room is the only area of the environment where visitors are allotted a fixed time. Also, each group of spectators contains one or more performers, who are "embedded" within the group and haunt the peripheral attention of a particular group during the event.
The visitors enter the waiting room and are given a color-coded ticket. Here, while they await for their number to be announced, they can relax, watch a foreign news broadcast and visit with fellow participants. When the number is announced, with the assistance of an usher, a small group of between 3-7 visitors is led from the waiting area into the next space.
As the visitors enter into the darkened and spare immersion space they encounter a world of matter and media. Steel canisters with installed stove-top heating coils stationed around the periphery of the room provide intense warmth in the space while five screen units suspended at different heights project a series of fractured narratives dealing with haunting and the loss of subjectivity within a discontinuous world. The visitors must remain in the space for a set time duration, moving through multiple fields simultaneously; erotic experience, solitude and abandonment, deformation and reformation of vision from crumbled media.
The control systems of the immersion room are now revealed as visitors step into the next space. Here, the visitors are given the priviledged point of view into a nexus of information, control and surveillance. The visitors can observe the operation of the computer controlled sound and video appratuses, revealed by the presence of performer/operators interfaced to this equipment as well as confront both live and tape delayed surveillance recordings of the waiting room. The visitors can also witness a computer generated flythough of the immersion space, further destabilizing their understanding of the real/virtual and performer/spectator.
The visitors proceed through a long narrow corridor on their way to the exit space. Here they see, suspended above them, two video monitors with each of the narratives from the immersion space played through as 8 minute loops in their original, chronological order. The disjunctive video fragments of the immersion space now give way to two separated stories, running in parallel with each other.
In the final space, the visitors undergo a further perspectival shift: here, video is projected onto the far wall. In this case, however, select images from the video narratives undergo a violent decomposition and reconstruc- tion through the elements of heat and film. Faced with this deeper instability of media and image, the visitors are free to enter the world anew or cycle through the event again.
Literature
Salter, Chris. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MASS: The MIT Press, 2010.
Exhibitions & Events