A Vast Museum of Insignificant Things
video installation, projection in corner: approximately 10’ high, 4’ at widest, 12min loop, 2007
Installed at G2, Chicago
“A Vast Museum of Insignificant Things” ties together the painterly, abstract, sublime images of video projection and the visceral qualities of sound to architectural space. After much research on the elusive nature of memory, I wanted to create a walk-in representation of the brain, focused on the area where our memory might “live”. I wanted to provide a visual representation of how memory appears to work, change, disappear and generate new content on its own. By projecting a cascading, irregular shape into a white corner of a black room, Vast Museum… captures the receding, shape-shifting and vivid qualities of memories as they function in this intangible “corner” of our minds. The projector is hidden high up in a corner and the light from the projector hits the walls and then the floor, breaking up its standard rectangular projection shape. Four speakers are placed throughout the room playing a surround sound mix of ambient tones representing the sounds and pressures of the inner body, electrical buzzes hinting at neuron activity and a mix of sounds from “outside of the head” that trigger memories and guide them as they slide into each other. The source video includes Super-8, 16mm and DV footage from a wide variety of sources. The fundamental loop of imagery is about 3 minutes long, but once it starts over some things have changed slightly, the images interact differently, and there are subtle alterations in their clarity, accompanying audio and timing. These changes attempt to instigate a subconscious memory game in the minds of the viewers.