Here it is:

Guarded would have occupied the center of the room, Flat Land the far right side, shielded from Guarded by a rear-screen panel.  Lost doesn’t appear at all.  Hardly workable this.  None of the galleries movable walls figure in this layout; and the old wall that blocks the emergency exit on the lower right wasn’t considered at all.

And here’s the gallery plan again:

For more on the installation plan read this prior post.

]]> http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/installation-shots-of-imaginative-feats/feed/ 0 http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/rebooting-imaginative-feats-an-extra-and-no-curricular-quasi-open-source-project/ http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/rebooting-imaginative-feats-an-extra-and-no-curricular-quasi-open-source-project/#comments Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:08:14 +0000 John Muse http://www.finleymuse.com/?p=785 We will make the three armatures that drive Imaginative Feats available to Haverford College students and others in the community.  What will they do with them?

Last week John sent out the following in an email to his past, present, and future students:

As some of you may know, Jeanne C. Finley and I now have an exhibition in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery.

We would like to make the apparatuses that drive this exhibition available to anyone who creates media for them: you create the DVDs, we replace our DVDs with yours, we consider the consequences, we have a party.

The devices include:

1. a rotating platform with 2 channels of video and 2 channels of audio (what could you do with images that move around the room, our searchlights and aggressive beams?)

2. a flat-panel display with one channel of video and one channel of audio (what would you do with a 16:9 HD display that has to compete with and or complement the rotating platform?)

3. a double-sided screen with 2 channels of video and 2 channels of audio with parabolic speakers (what would you do with a surface with an image on either side, and speakers that isolate sound, putting it right into someone’s head?)

Make five DVDs, make one, make two; make anything you want, but make it fabulous, painful, impressive, and perfect for the device and its formal limits and/or advantages.

If there’s enough interest we could choose an evening to showcase all of the pieces created for these devices.

Feel free to discuss this with anyone you think might be interested; find allies, build teams, etc.

Please contact me as soon as possible if you’re interested: we could take an evening to look at the current show, go over the equipment, and toss around ideas.

Best,
John

John met with 7 students over the last few evenings and discussed the formal possibilities of the devices along with project ideas.  In two weeks we will look at a few of their clips and/or actions in the gallery, and in early December we will reboot the exhibition with their works.  And have a party.

Documentation of Imaginative Feats, like most video installation work, poses specific challenges: because it’s dark, the exposures are long, and as the exposures are long, the moving projectors must be stilled and each of the video works, paused.  We thus have the luxury and responsibility of choosing particular still-frames for each of the projectors and for the flat panel display.  For similar reasons we must bracket for each scene: a few for the ambient light, a few for the projected image.  We then composite the resulting shots.  Which is easier now than it used to be: “Merge to HDR” is our friend.  And finally we must create views that include the various apparatuses—the rotating platform as well as the benches, viewers, parabolic speakers, etc, i.e., machinery of installation—because the point is to show not just what happens, but how.

So, not only is the staging of the work for photographic representation another turn of production, the work exists or fails to exist based on the photographic translation. For example, Guarded was first shown in an intimate space at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in 2003.  We used the four walls but no rear screens, no complex architecture, no long throws of projections down corridors.  And the documentation represents the space as a whole only through a simple composite:

At LA Freewaves in ‘04 we used 3 6′ by 8′ rear-screens and an existing corner to build a chamber in a much larger space and the results were interesting and have guided us since, both because the relation of inside to outside is now mediated by imagery, and because the documentation of the piece itself is invariably richer.  Here’s a video clip of the set-up at Freewaves:

The documentation clip posted on the Guarded project page combines shots of this Freewaves installation with shots of the version at Sweetow.  The rotator has its drama, but viewers in the space and a view that includes both projections is only possible with rear-screens and more complex spaces.

We’ll soon post Lisa’s documentation of Imaginative Feats.

]]> http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/documenting-imaginary-feats/feed/ 0 http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/10/imaginative-feats-defeated-and-rediscovered/ http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/10/imaginative-feats-defeated-and-rediscovered/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:30:55 +0000 John Muse http://www.finleymuse.com/?p=607 Here are four diagrams:

The first, a drawing of the gallery before the walls were demolished and six 10′ wide “floating” sections installed; the second, a drawing on a “napkin” from May of ‘09; the third, a diagram created in September for the catalog, the fourth, an approximate rendering of the actual installation from a few days ago.

And so did we learn an elementary lesson—again—that every first-year architect must know: moving through a space is not the same as enjoying a two-dimensional drawing of that space.  So many changes: the movable walls of Cantor Fitzgerald presented possibilities that we could only “feel” once we started moving them around.  Guarded allowed us to set back one of these walls, and it became a screen; right proportions, 4:3, and a nice spill over the edges.  This formal stuff—interruptions, gaps in the walls, screens—these “edit” Guarded, breaking up the clockwise flow of the images.

Note that in our napkin drawing, the movable walls, all but the middle on are pushed to the sides.  They disappear in the published version, but come back in the actual diagram, because crucial to the space.  Note too that consistent across these diagrams is the spill of Guarded into the small foyer.  We saw that during our first walk-through.  But too note that we got the direction of rotation wrong in the second diagram—something we should know well enough by now.

And Flat Land needed more space, more throw for the projectors and more room around the screen so that its flatness could be felt, navigated, discovered.  And could use even more.

All the torque of the earlier drawing and diagram doesn’t work so well in the space itself; but offsetting  the back wall just a bit achieves the disorientation even more effectively.  The lesson?  Scale drawings.  But more importantly, scale models.  But working it out on-the-spot, though not ideal, can be an adventure.  This time we got it right.  On the spot.  Mostly.

Imaginative Feats Literally Presented/Three Fables for Projection: Guarded, Flat Land, Lost peer through the imaginative gloss of words, photographs, and video images Americans use to prepare themselves for the wars on terror and in Iraq, presenting the lives of those who participate—either willingly or not.

In the sound/media installation Guarded, two video projectors, two DVD decks, and stereo speakers are mounted on a rotating platform in the center of the gallery. As it turns, the projectors throw images that follow each other around the opposing walls. Pieces of text, adapted from a Red Cross pamphlet entitled “Preparing for the Unexpected,” run through images of daily life.

Flat Land explores the visual culture of men and women at war by looking at publicly available images of “Flat Daddies,” two-dimensional life-size cutouts of soldiers used by families with young children to help them stay connected to their absent parent; and “Flat Stanleys,” small two-dimensional cutouts of a cartoon boy sent on worldwide adventures by American schoolchildren. Photographs are projected on opposite sides of a single projection screen, and speakers deliver two narrative accounts: one of Flat Stanley’s journey around the world, the other, a woman’s account of her Flat Daddy.

Lost pairs an Army Chaplain’s audio diary entry with a single evolving shot of a former military base, where fog both obscures and reveals details of the landscape. Original video footage reframes the moral ambiguities of the diary segment, which chronicles the shooting of an Iraqi during a house raid by American soldiers and their efforts to assist the man’s widow.

An opening reception will be held Friday, October 23 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Gallery. In addition, a Gallery Talk will take place Saturday, October 24, at 4 p.m., moderated by Andrew Suggs, Executive Director of Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia.

Jeanne C. Finley, a Guggenheim Fellow and Alpert/Cal Arts Award winner, is a Professor of Media Arts at the California College of Arts in San Francisco.

John Muse is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford. He has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC, Berkeley, and an M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Overseen by the John B. Hurford ’60 Humanities Center and located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12-5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m. For more information, contact Matthew Seamus Callinan, Campus Exhibitions Coordinator, at (610) 896-1287 or mcallina@haverford.edu.

Haverford College is located at 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA, 19041.