I have been thinking a lot about the set, the frame, the situation an artist places their audience within to create a more engaging, full body experience. My subject matter, the increasing relevance of our awareness of the technological and visual overload through which we live our lives, requires some sort of articulation beyond me, the performer, merely standing in front of people, giving a presentation with a slide projector. To create feelings of information overload there must also be a breadth of imagery, of visual overload. Ray Eames talked about the multi-screen performance in his masterminded operation Glimpses of the USA in the Moscow World Fair Auditorium in 1959. This sensory overload of screens and imagery mimicked the subject matter itself. The space of the multiscreen, like the space of the computer, compresses physical space. Each screen could be used to show a different scene around the same subject matter creating unusual connections, “an avalanche of related data that comes at a viewer too fast for him to cull and reject it… a twelve minute blitz.” This idea, which effectively pre-empted internet, could really be useful within my work. I love the notion of creating a performance space that has a certain potential for something to happen, and in which something might happen, sporadically, but doesn’t have to – that has two lives. What Eames talked about as the information machine, designed to give a lot of information in a short amount of time can be absorbed into the performative space. Eames selected seven screens – a credible number but not so many that they couldn’t be scanned in an allotted time. I am now going to attempt to design the seven-screen-changing-performance-machine-space for my own practice.
Book: Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon Art of Projection Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG 2009
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