“Crossworlds (Orai/Kalos)” by Paul Hertz

Title:

Crossworlds (Orai/Kalos)

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Artist Statement:

Crossworlds presents sampled images and audio in an interactive computer installation that continually varies its content and compositional parameters with materials acquired through a web-based database portal and on-site performance and media acquisition. The installation uses a circular table as a projection surface to display a computer monitor image. The table is equipped with twelve photo sensors. Visitors wave variable-density filters attached to wands over the sensors to control the installation.

In the installation, images and sounds of nature mix with images and sounds of human cities and technology. Reduced to patterns, natural and man made imagery merge in a hypnotic kaleidoscope; however, when visitors begin to interact with the display, topical images from communications media erupt. The images come from a continually updated database open for contributions from the public throughout the year. The artist will also collect new materials in Nagoya in performances with a laptop computer.

Crossworlds is an intermedia work, where sounds and image events are controlled by the same underlying parameters, and an interactive work, where each visitor creates a new configuration. The publicly accessible database and the performance element further emphasize the role of the artist as a mediator of social processes, as opposed to an isolated creator of objects.

Crossworlds attempts to examine how the “comings and goings” of communications technologies are mixing geographical locations and persons together into new constellations. It is easy to be hypnotized by the speed and momentum of these changes, by the transformation of the world into patterns of information. Fortunately, our state of technological distraction is continually interrupted by events, large and small. Will our dearest desire be to return to distraction, or will we waken to the construction of a more just world?