Video art installation with David Bowie
This is reprinted from my older blog, dated November 10, 2008, with minor edits.
Insert : Rest in peace Mr. Bowie. Your music and memory ensures you are with us eternally. As a kid, my cousin Amy was an superfan, and as an adult, my friend Sam Ewen was one too. I’d come to appreciate your music much later in life, but I’d always known how important you were to the strange and beautiful universe we call fandom.
About 2 years ago, I received a phone call about doing an art installation that would coincide with a music festival in NY called the Highline Festival. Imagine my excitement when I learned it was to be curated by none other than David Bowie. Seriously, what? Yes indeed. Mr. Bowie chose to pay homage to the surrealist photographer Claude Cahun. I was not familiar with their work but quickly understood it’s context as I delved into their commentary on sexuality, gender, role reversal, and notions of beauty – all topics that deserve their commentary today. I found it interesting that their message is still very much relevant almost 100 years later. I invite you to do your own research on Claude Cahun, some of their work is obvious in its representation, some hard to touch with descriptions or labels.
The installation was to occur at an outdoor space I had unknowingly walked by a hundred times. In Chelsea, New York exists the General Theological Seminary, it is somewhat of an fortress of solitude in an otherwise busy neighborhood dense with art galleries and nightlife. An interesting note, the trees within the walls of the seminary survived a disease that killed off just about the entire breed of tree on the rest of Manhattan. The cluster at the seminary still stands tall today in its quiet quarantine.
Claude Cahun did some photomontage in the 1920’s and I thought I might do the same with my modern tools of computers and video projection (note: projection mapping was super new at the time, there was no easy way to accomplish mapping, had to create one’s own software). I scanned many of Claude Cahun’s photos at high resolution and “choreographed” a subtly animated photomontage spanning eight thin vertical screens which acted as satellites to a main center screen. The center screen displayed Cahun’s imagery in full while the satellite screens presented zooms and crops associated with the same image, showing details otherwise lost to a viewer who might be watching from a distance in the large outdoor garden. Magnified portions of the next image in a list of about 50 would start to appear on some of the satellite screens before taking over the entire space. It was a slow creep of content from the perimeter to the center of the seminary grounds. I executed all of the programming using a development tool known as Isadora (similar to VVVV or Max/Msp in its nodal interface, but with a specialty in live performance and staging) and built a computer with enough VGA outputs to drive all the projectors at once (again, this was all new territory). The screens were constructed of Lucite (shout out to Canal plastics) which was media-blasted for a “frosted look”, this resulted in a projection that seemed to float in space while casting a soft glow on the grass underneath, and could be viewed from both sides.
David Bowie showed up incognito, I had no idea he was on the premises as I saw a group enter while setting up (aka dealing with technical difficulties that were causing me to run super late). He stayed to see the looping show play out and loved the treatment. He did not have any direction over how Claude Cahun’s work would be represented, that was left to me and my partners (Smoke and Mirror’s, shouts to Dennis and John). This turned out to be one of the highpoints of my career, I’m quite proud of it.
“Life on mars” seems a good outro here.
For personal use only; please do not repost, republish, reuse.
