Dumb Type - OR installation








	[OR] installation


[OR] installation © ICC PHOTOS VIDEOS		Four long slabs of glass are laid on a white carpet. Video images of men and women are projected onto surfaces of the glass. The glass and the carpet warp the images. As a result, there are immaterial images and material sounds. The images of lying men and women will metamorphose when sensors detect the visitor. The work is a meditation on the "grey humor" overhanging the space between life and death. Four body-length "laboratory slides" are laid out on a sterile white carpet, each "slab" consisting of two glass plates sandwiching an LCD film that switches ON/OFF between semi-opaque and transparent. The glass and carpet serve to distress the projected images, and to obstruct /reflect/absorb sound. Four flat image-display sites as planar pools, presence without depth. These, in turn, placed in grid formation as scanning/sorting "beds" in a hypothetical holding area, a zone of watched manifestation. Unto these surfaces are mapped video transforms of seven men and women, multiple possibilities which at the point of projection are made singularly "real" while the remaining visions are stripped away as impossible unrealities. The computer-controlled laser disc system implicity renders forth only one sample out of many. In contrast to the non-materiality of the visuals, the invisible non-directionality of sound shapes an unobtrusive aural ambience. Visitors are free to walk around in the room yet "outside" the sound, until hidden sensors detect their intervening movements, and arouse slight shifts in the planar foci, disturbances in the projected Images, displacements in the audio. This installation was commissioned by the ICC (Inter Communication Center) in Tokyo for its opening in April 1997 and is now part of its permanent collection. A new version was purchased by the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Lyons (France) in 2000 for the exhibition GRAME/Musiques en scène. The artwork was presented by Lille 2004 - European Capital of Culture, as part of the exhibition Souffleurs d’image - Cinémas du futur in Lille, from 6 Dec 2003 to 22 Feb 2004. Conception dumb type Visual Direction Shiro TAKATANI Sound Ryoji IKEDA Compilation Hiromasa TOMARI characters Kenjiro ISHIBASHI Seiko OUCHI Takao KAWAGUCHI Noriko SUNAYAMA Tadasu TAKAMINE Mayumi TANAKA Misako YABUUCHI Alfred BIRNBAUM