A Sense of Place

A Sense of Place, 1998: Map
image/gif
111 × 83

A Sense of Place, 1998: Blurred Screen
image/jpeg
111 × 83

A Sense of Place, 1998: Installation Layout
image/jpeg
111 × 89

A Sense of Place, 1998: Interactivity Graph
image/jpeg
111 × 83

A Sense of Place, 1998: Beijing Street Scene
image/jpeg
111 × 83

A Sense of Place, 1998: Downtown Los Angeles
image/jpeg
112 × 84

A Sense of Place, 1998: Beijing Rain
image/jpeg
111 × 83

A Sense of Place, 1998: Hollywood
image/jpeg
112 × 84

An out-of-focus "still-life" image of a window display is projected on a full screen gallery wall. As the audience moves in the gallery space, items from the inventory of objects in the image come into focus depending on the audience's relative position in the gallery space. After a certain amount of time in front of the image, a street scene becomes gradually visible, functioning as a "window" reflection with its ambient sound superimposed on the still-life image. This reflection and sound gives the window display a cultural context as it positions the window still-life into an urban setting. This scene reveals itself to contain either Oriental features (China) or Occidental ones (Los Angeles). The program selects one image from amongst a set of ten possibilities. Every so often, the reflection scenes are animated. Depending on the particular make-up of the database, (which objects the audience has invested time in front of), the program shows a matrix schemata showing the database values based on where the audience is standing in front of the image.
The work has a cultural and technological premise. In this age of mass migration, cultural environments are transported across geographical borders. A window display may seem Spanish, Chinese, Greek, etc. but its geographical location may be anywhere in the world. The surrounding environment visualized through the surface reflection in the installation, contexutalizes the window display's location between Orient and Occident. Paul Virilio describes the ubiqitous monitoring security camera systems in the urban landspace as one of "giving presence". The out-of-focus image in the installation responds to the audience's presence by showing itself (putting sections of the image into focus) depending on the audience's location within the viewing space. In effect, the projected image comes alive (comes into being) in the presence of the viewer.

(George Legrady)