World Premiere of “Frozen Palaces”
Symposium:
Presentation Title:
- World Premiere of “Frozen Palaces”
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Tim Etchells artistic director of the renowned UK performance group Forced Entertainment and photographer Hugo Glendinning will present work from their CD-Rom projects Frozen Palaces and Nightwalks. They will discuss the projects in relation to their experience as artists whose work spans a range of media from theatre and gallery-based performances, site-specfic interventions, photography, installation and video. “Our work concerns the relationship(s) between spaces, performance actions, and photography in stills, film or video. Projects have repeatedly explored the construction and deconstruction of narrative from visual and textual fragments and the role of the viewer in navigating space and visual material. Extending these concerns at the heart of our most recent work in digital media is the development of a new language in which narrative can be both made and deconstructed. Utilising and reinventing the possibilities of interactive media our two recent projects Frozen Palaces and Nightwalks have created series of linked navigable 360 panoramas – landscapes of frozen narrative and displaced figures through which the user may move and explore on a computer screen. Indeed, for us the use of Apple’s QTVR as we are employing it in these projects, lies somewhere between installation, cinema and photography itself, allowing a unique opportunity to interrogate the nature of photographic representation and to expand the potential of the medium as it meets digital technology.
From installation it takes the active, seeking and mobile gaze of the viewer in 3-dimensional (albeit virtual) space, from cinema it can reference the conventions of moving camera and point-of-view and from photography it can allow us to render the>world as a still moment, a place in which time has been halted…”. In the vast house of “Frozen Palaces” time itself has stopped still. In each room, a series of events – from love affairs through murders, ghostly levitations, parties and even drunken hallucinations – is halted at some banal or significant moment. In this house of interlocking dreams the people or actors themselves have the status of objects -clues to be found and connected. The viewer alone is free to move, explore, and investigate a series of inter-linked scenes of a world full of people and crammed with stories but a world that has stopped completely still. Using Apple’s QuickTime VR (QTVR), “Frozen Palaces” is a ground-breaking collaboration between Britain’s Sheffield-based artists Forced Entertainment and leading arts photographer Hugo Glendinning.
