“Public Interface Effects: Re-embodiment and transversality in public Projection” presented by Colangelo and Dávila
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Transformative Cinema
Presentation Title:
- Public Interface Effects: Re-embodiment and transversality in public Projection
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
To what degree can the creative use of technology enable highly specific, deeply embodied experiences that both express and ameliorate the shocks of ‘media cities’ (McQuire 2008) today? With The Line, the third in a series of research-creation (Smith and Dean 2009) works, we continue to explore this question and, more broadly, the role of digital media in shaping our relationship with public space, architecture, and data. The Line consists of a video database of lines at various scales (a line in the earth, a sidewalk, a fence, a road, a row of houses, a strip mall, a highway, a border, the flightpath of a jet plane, etc.) projected onto a 10-metre long snow fence. By sensing proximity to the fence, the system will enable viewers to recombine segments from this database to create a composite image. The Line will be included in Land | Slide : Possible Futures, a site-specific art exhibition in Markham, Ontario that aims to encourage a collective conversation around the future of land use. This project tests theoretical claims about the effects of interactive architectural public displays — namely, the increased transversality of identity and subjectivity (Murphie 2004), the re-embodiment of the experience of media that sees the body less as a point in a perspectival system and more as a vector in space (Hansen 2004), and the radical contingency (Harbord 2007) of surface effects experienced in public space. By deploying a phenomenological approach through various perceptual scales and levels of access to what is otherwise an organising principle, motif, and tool for arranging humans, objects and environments, we hope to afford participants the opportunity to sense their relationship to the line and its connection to environmental, social, political, technological, and human systems (Latour 2005, Rancière 2000).
