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in a thousand drops... refracted glances
Newby, Dulic, Gotfrit
in a thousand drops... refracted glances explores the way identity is constructed in an increasingly fragmented milieu. This construction works in multiple directions. We perceive, ourselves and others through a series of multiplicities. The work creates a dynamic cinematic environment encompassing multiple screens and audio channels that work to present fragments of the bodies of humans in hybrid relations to themselves, thereby creating a sense of the fragility of experience. As the Cubist's expressed in their work that our world is made of a series of slices of reality--temporal and spatial that then we try to assemble in order to understand the world we live in--in this work we see this process put into a dynamic and interactive environment. By choosing the face as its center of attention it points to the way we judge and gain a sense of both ourselves and others. The dynamic and interactive nature of the work becomes a symbolic actuality (simulation) of the dynamic nature of how we both construct and discover our identities. The work reveals a background made of deeper perennial questions: Who am I? What is my community? Where do its boundaries exist and how permeable might they be? The experience of in a thousand drops... refracted glances is a audio/visual sculpture in fragmented space and time that becomes a single audiovisual image as one interacts with the space of the exhibition. The sense of embodiment creates an interrelationship between the visible images, our movement and the harmonically rich sonic environment. The interactive aspects of the work provide points of focus for flows of both audible and visible images. As one moves around the work a subtle effect is exerted on how the images are animated. Characters composed of multiples emerge and are accompanied by synchronized emergent musical gestures that are produced by the engagement of the participant. The resulting audiovisual environment is one of construction and deconstruction of bodies through processes of stitching, repetition, collage, stretching, contraction, multiplication, and reduction. As a result of these processes new hybrid fugal bodies are born that speak to the variety and complexity of the ecological and interpersonal balances that depend on the mutual interdependencies of the community of agents that make up its population. The work continuously and dynamically shifts its focus providing opportunities for the participant to engage in a spectrum of modes of attention -- from lateral to narrowly focused. Interactions with the work take the form of refracted glances both rewarding and confounding in an ongoing process of making sense of a chaosmos -- the balance between confusion and order -- the fantastic and the logical -- dreamt and waking realities.
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