Mike McCrea - A Work In Progress

The Project | Final Documentation

Documentation

EXTRAPOLATIONS

RESULTS

It was extremely valuable to construct this second iteration in a gallery space both for understanding the time and materials necessary for fabrication and to realize the time component of interactions and the video's evolution.

A recurring comment on the presentation of the work related to the scale of the video. It feels like there is less controll over the perceptual effect with this sort of middle ground of video monitors. The form of their arrangement was important (it was agreed after the installation that the initial intention of creating an arc was most effective) but the scale was determined more by the size of the monitors than by an ideal, which I've put off on account of the monitors. That discussion leads to one of how well the space was consistent with the concept. I had envisioned the arc to in a sense direct the movement of the viewer while also appearing to brush by the space and be gone from it once seen. The support structure was slightly misaligned, however, due to the give on the monitor arms and so I decided against the arc because it revealed the imperfections more than the staggered alignment.

I've since thought about alternate presentation scenarios that involve more spatially immersive projection surfaces, although it is tough to justify conceptually. The main work seems to be in the integration of the "fifth node". While I think the spatial and temporal counterpoint is founded in the composition of the sound and the experience, there is an issue of refining the timing or order in which the fifth node intervenes in the experience. This will take a conceptual revision of the role of the sound in the 5th node. It does set a tone and draws from the original experience of which this is a "document", but I have to commit to this as a valid theme and continue to reinforce it if it is to be consistent and a more focused experience. Referring back to the original experience also serves as a usedful reference to the decision of the scale of this installation. I've hesitated to step the scale up very much because of the intimacy of the original experience and I'm trying to stay true to the essence of that in some ways. I don't mind the situation being clearly mediated, as the original experience was as well, and it would seem like a cheesy attempt at immersion if it were to be blow up to a larger scale.

One approach to solidifying the experience is to play with the logic of the work's evolution over multiple interactions. Building in a sort of memory into the system would help to bring this into more of a living document as well. An explicit re-framing of the interaction is to be avoided, though, I think. I think it's ok to ask the viewer to find the experiencial metaphor through the given process without a direct reflection of them in the work. This will require more weight to be placed on the installation itself to give a self-contained experience.

PHOTO DOC