Agora

Agora 1995
Interactive video and computer installation. Collaboration with Jim Campbell.

Exhibition

“Untitled,” Agora, International Society of Electronic Artists, Annual Exhibition, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1995

Untitled (Agora) is an interactive installation that combines memory of movements external to a space, videodisc images and text. A software algorithm controls the videodisc selecting sequences from it; the combining of images in layers; and display of these elements. The viewer enters a space with a video screen suspended a few feet from the entrance and parallel to the wall containing the door. The screen is translucent and the viewer sees an image from the backside upon entering. Moving around the screen to the front the viewer sees an image of the outside of the space. The image is comprised of layers of digital video. These layers contain ghost like images of the viewers’ recent entrance into the space, combined with similar images of the history of other activity external to the space. Additional layers contain an outline of a figure filled with text that moves about the image, and text that fills the image of the doorway to the space.

A camera is mounted outside the space of the installation facing the doorway. A computer numerically tracks amount of movement seen by the camera. The computer also stores a seven-second image of the movement that is continuously played back in a loop. As people pass the camera the movement is continuously layered in the memory of the computer. New images from the camera erase a portion of the previously stored image. The display and recording of the stored image occur at different speeds.

An outline image of a figure, stored on videodisc, moves about the image. The figure and the image of the doorway are filled with text. The text is the symptoms of agoraphobia and the side effects of medications used to treat the disorder. A software algorithm evaluates the amount of movement tracked by the computer. It then determines the speed of playback and record, the movement of the figure, the text filling the door and the figure. If there is a great amount of movement the piece becomes “anxious.” The figure moves about the image in frantic and eccentric ways, the symptoms displayed in text relate anxieties and the recording and display of the image of movement becomes rapid. As movement decreases the figure calms, text is less anxious and the display of the recorded image slows.