T
R
A
N
S
C
R
I
P
T
 		1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12		 the interactive gambit (do not run! we are your friends!)

back | next

THE LIVENESS OF VIDEO surveillance has a built-in eroticism as does vision through glass. In "Jump Cuts," we combined these two modes of 20th century vision, both instruments of exposure, in a re-working of the traditional theater "marquee." This is a permanent public art project for a United Artists Cineplex in San Jose, California.

The traditional marquee encroached into the civic space of the sidewalk to announce an event in a mute space beyond: the marquee has always been a form of urban seduction. This theater, recently designed by Ken Rodriguez and Tom Aidala, has a curtain wall in front of a huge exhibitionistic lobby with freestanding circulation elements, fully exposed to the street. It is anything but mute, theatrisizing circulation and broadcasting it to the street. What then is left to the marquee?

 
The installation straddles this glass wall: a layer of liquid crystal panels outside faces a row of video projectors inside. In the "off" or translucent mode, the liquid crystal panels tease visual accessibility between the lobby and street. Each projector is fed by 2 sets of live video cameras over the long stretches of escalators, one set looking down in plan, the other set looking forward in elevation. When the direct view is cut off by the liquid crystal, it is replaced by its video surrogate. Five levels of escalators are stretched out along the street elevation. The motion of the escalators scans bodies across the facade.

Because the field of view of each camera overlaps the next, there is a stuttering of bodies. Before a person fully disappears from one screen, he or she appears on the next. The glass sequences plan view to elevation to transparent mode and finally to movie trailers from a set of laser disks, provided monthly by United Artists. The cameras, laser disc players, projectors and liquid crystal glass are all computer-controlled, synced and sequenced to start at dusk.
 
back | next Page:  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |  11  |  12