Installation and Webgame by Christa Erickson
Photographs, home movies, and today's digital media inform the way we remember and interact with one another. They extend and even become our memories. This installation and its accompanying performance attempt to pose questions about patterns of 'memory' and interaction, contrasting electronic technologies to age-old bodily methods. What is enabled and what is lost? MNEMONIC DEVICES explores these questions in an installation that resembles a media saturated playground.
The most prominent component of the work, a twelve-foot seesaw, literally requires two peoples' participation. The seesaw acts like a giant video switcher: the way the participants 'play' determines the sequence, direction, and speed of images projected on an adjacent screen. Imagery is shot on super8 film, lending it a home movie feel, and depicts closely cropped gestures between people. With no one at 'play', the screen contains images of 'leaders' collaged from TV, film, and video games that span this century.
| The second component of this installation examines the e-rhetoric of 'connection' and the collective memory of the web. The two on-site web stations (laptops on opposite ends of a table that resembles the seesaw) allow people to play a scavenger hunt game with each other or people in remote locations. |
| To echo the visual and conceptual qualities of the other pieces, a four-foot tall sculptural pendulum with embedded video elements completes the installation. Each arc of the pendulum switches between live, closed-circuit images of the gallery play space and pre-recorded images from turn of the century playgrounds, when film began. In a sense, the pendulum component creates a literal ‘see-saw’ sway, a movement between present and past. |
TECHNICAL:
- Seesaw editor: potentiometers, phototransistors, laptop computer, laserdisc player, data acquisition card, and video projector
- Scavenger hunt game: java-based applet run on any 2 computers with network game server
- Video pendulum: camera, laserdisc player, LCD flatpanels, & custom electronics
CREDITS (2000):
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Christa Erickson |
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Richard Metzger |
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Kelly Phillips |
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Christa Erickson Richard Metzger Andy Mirkis |
Funded by Artist's Grant and Residency from the Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University.