Formants is an interactive installation work featuring sculptures with embedded audio. Two wigs are positioned so as to mutely face one another on a single pedestal with two ornate brushes attached to the base. When a viewer brushes the hair of either wig, it sings fragmented sections from classical music and operatic arias. Intersections between technological experience and the emotional culture of our society is a strong interest of mine. I have been investigating man's interactions with machines in order to connect with one another through past work such as RealSpace (2007). This work situated the MySpace social networking environment within a spatial context, exploring how space may come to legitimize or influence relationships. Formants (2008) is a result of my curiosity in intimate interactions with machines, interactions which may elicit equal feelings of comfort and anxiety. The invitation to brush the hair of the sculptures is confounded by their placement in a semi-public place, as the human-like qualities of the piece both entice the viewer and make for an awkward spectatorship. The intimacy required to activate the sculptures forces a transgression of normative human to (humanoid) behaviour. Recently I have been developing a piece where the binary program of two music boxes playing "Theme from Love Story" is "hacked" in order to emulate the technical practice of eternal love. Each music box has corresponding halves of their notes physically removed - their program now is not one of automated repetition of actions representing love, but of a yearning for the presence of another. Roland Barthes spoke in his 1977 A Lover's Discourse of eternal love as an endless return. But this return, this repetition is not banal: it is a constant repetition of the different. The interactive use of the music boxes allows one to experience this infinite potential for recombination, the preciousness of the rare moments that the music boxes temporarily complete the original program. I have faith that no matter how cold or technical our devices become, that we will continue to reach out and long for one another in familiar ways made only a little strange. Formants was made with a New Media Production grant courtesy of Soil Digital Media Suite and Neutral Ground Artist-Run center, 2007. |
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