May 10 & 11 5pm-9pm
Spring Show 2005
721 Broadway
at Waverly Place
4th Floor
South Elevators
New York, NY 10003
For additional
information email
itp.inquiries@nyu.edu
or call 212.998.1880
| then | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Maria Mayer Matthias Lehmann |
|
| Instructor: | Greer, Heather | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://then-theproject.com/ | |
| Keywords: | memories, New York, video, installation, surround sound, immersive | |
| video/sound installations, 2 phone booths, memories and the city | ||
| ‘Then’ is an immersive video and sound installation about memory. Memories are personal internal worlds we all carry with us all the time. I imagine them like invisible ‘bubbles’ of fragmented inner stories of our individual pasts mixed with and interrupted by the very present impressions of the actual space we move in. This thesis project is an attempt to imagine how these ‘memory bubbles’ could look like, and how an environment can be created with video and sound that allows for the viewer to experience an immersion into this imagined internal space. | ||
| Personal Statement: | I have been interested in memories for a long time. They play a crucial role in our lives; our daily life functionality depends on them. My background, before I studied photographic design, is in social work and years back I worked in a mental hospital in Switzerland. I remember how amazed I was by how the people there all had their very own inner worlds with them all the time. This is true for everywhere, but it seems even more obvious and extreme in a psychiatric institution. A lot of times these inner worlds would clash with the one they found themselves living in. Sometimes the interconnection could happen more peaceful, but sometimes it was violently disastrous for the person. It all depended on the way people remembered their past experiences and how they were able to map them to the current experiences of their present lives. Although memories shape our identity, they are invisible and hard to grasp for someone outside. This is an obviously very difficult issue in terms of a therapy aspect, but very fascinating as a fact itself.
I always liked to analyze what is happening between people and around them and how people interact with the space they move in. Already as a child, I used to get lost in thoughts and imaginations about things one couldn\'t see but that were clearly sensible and existent. I dreamed a lot and rethought things that I did or that had happened over and over again. After being social worker for a few years I clearly felt the urge to translate what I perceived into photographs and so I decided to study photography. Only when I was already in New York, I started to experiment with video. The medium video can convey a sense of time better, to me it seems to be a much closer representation of the aspects of life I am interested in documenting. Video can be edited, it can be rewind, things can overlap and fade together, the image can be in sync with sound, or off. Things can go very fast or in slow motion, the cuts can be harsh or with smooth transitions and things can happen at the same time. Life itself is not like that. It appears very linear and we can only be in one place at the same time and even though events happen parallel, there is linearity to how we understand them and how new information gets to us. Even though life can\'t be rewind, it can be remembered. This memory space in our heads again seems to be rather nonlinear. There can be images and sounds at the same time, and they can be fragmented, they can be from different times right next to each other like a travel in time. And we can repeat them over and over and zap through them and much of this reminds me of the editing of a video. I am interested in examining if it is possible to translate these internal worlds of people into video, in the hope of discovering a new aspect or a new point of view in order to find a new piece of a possible answer to the big question of the \'big picture\'. It is obvious, that we cannot replicate our exact memories and even less exact memories from other people. But since memories are not records of events in our lives , but records of how we experience our worlds, we are talking here about emotions and moods that are not specific to one individual’s subjective experience, but can be understood by a broad majority of people. Hence they can be ‘read’ from a video art piece. | |
| Audience: | targeted towards an art gallery space audience | |
| User Scenario: | There is a room-large videoinstallation projected onto a wall that shows video from New York City mixed with fragments of memories of people. There is surround sound that intrigues the senses because it \'shows\' what was isn\'t visible but could be there. There are phone 2 booths, people can pick up the receiver and listen to memories other people tell. | |
| Technical System Description: | Video installation with surround sound system and phone booths hoocked up to a small Processing program. | |