"Echo & Narcissus" A Real Time Video Installation
Anat Pollack with Adam Goode
Echo & Narcissus 2003
My goal was to simulate my experience of memory in a post-traumatic state using a computer algorithm. I was interested in the stacking and layering of images and memories from the past, thus revealing how I experience the stillness of a frozen image in my mind; and the noise and the collapse of time that emerges at the end of the day. Desiderata was an exploration of my personal memories and desires. As the video plays, images disintegrate while others (re)emerge. Little is entirely clear as the information, the video and audio receded to the background, and emerge in the foreground.
The installation acts as a mirror, reflecting what is occurring in the space in which it is installed. The viewer must first approach the screen. After 15-60 seconds, the image of the viewer walking into the space appears in the image on the screen . Layered with the image of the viewer are ghost-like images of all of the others who have also been in the space, gazing at themselves in the mirror. Both the image on the screen and the sounds in the space are captured in real-time from the audience in the space. All video and audio clips are blended, the past and the present existing together: the accumulation of images taken of the space throughout the duration of the installation.
I work to alter people's perception of space and time by triggering their senses, emotions, and memory recall but in disjointed, ways. I hope for my work to function like trauma- we always see ourselves in the mirror, we pose and primp for our selves in the mirror. I want to return the viewer an experience of themselves that they will not otherwise experience. I was also working toward the uncanny effect of the layering of faces and bodies, all transposed onto one another. The uncanny sense that there are ghosts in the space- you see people emerge in the mirror no longer present in the present but in the past.
[ Artist Statement |
CV |
Teaching Philosophy |
Shi.ko Ltd., 2003 |
Desiderata |
Slides
]
Copyright 2004 by Anat Pollack anat pollack at hotmail dot com