[-empyre-] Re: affect in digital writing

[david jhave johnston <jhave2@gmail.com>]

In terms of synchronicity, I just visited the One River installation today!
 (Kenneth doesn't know me, i just arrived in vancouver area a few
months ago). And yes the installation is effective,
 sonically and visually stimulating and creative. Kenneth speak of the
works 17 minute cycle, and that is precisely the amount of time I
spent there, which is certainly an empirical testament to the work's
effective design.
 Also, in terms of what Brigid mentions "how to make something in
 which there is clarity, intention, aesthetic pleasure, but crucially
 also, room for someone else....", One River works well at that level
of space since it doesn't dominate the viewer, it establishes a zone
sufficiently complex that it evokes the seeking instincts in the
viewer (what neurologist Panksepp identifies as the lateral
hypothalamus) without startling the viewer. For me, it works at a
subtle boundary between work which touches and work which moves the
viewer.

 respects,
 jhave


 Message: 2
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 22:20:14 -0800
From: Kenneth Newby < knewby@sfu.ca>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] affect in digital writing
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Message-ID: < 7635fd2e623c884eb00349678435d0fb@sfu.ca>
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Our recent work One River (running),  coming out of our Computational
Poetics research project, involves a gallery with a "river" of 32
screens suspended in space, each of which can carry a discrete
projection.  The "river" rises in an arch in the middle of the room,
inviting the gallery visitors to enter and experience the work from a
variety of perspectives.  The screens work effectively as front and
rear projection surfaces.  A 13-channel audio system diffuses
soundscape material and a set of eight channels of audio run above the
"river" with the voices of the community flowing from end to end.  The
whole effect is large, somewhat cinematic, but in an expanded spatial
sense in that the two-dimensional quality of the projection surface is
broken up like so many droplets of water in a rushing river to become a
sculptural presence in the room.  The work has just gone up for
exhibition and the initial experiences of people suggest it works very
well as an image of community that involves the visitor in the space
and time of the work.  I think much of this has to do with the scale of
the work and its temporal dimensions as well.  It's not a "one-liner"
as Jim Campbell terms many interactive installation works, but rather a
kind of spatially expanded cinema that has a mutable form over its 17
minute cycle.  It "writes" large with the voices and mouths of the
community in which it's installed.

Kenneth.