The Elasticity of the Projected Form

Luminocity
Talk / Performance
2016

A performance/talk held at Luminocity, a new-media, public art festival organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery. This event ran in tandem with the following exhibition The Descent and The View, and like Luminocity and other new-media platforms of this type seek to expand the use of images and the way they are created.

This event focused on how image devices and the environments in which they are shown impact sensorial perceptions and create spaces where viewers are able to examine, think and learn through perception. This talk also incorporated a discussion about the role of play in the creation of such devices or spaces. To coincide with the topic, the podium was produced as a new media sculpture, equipped with cctv surveillance cameras and displaying an almost stereoscopic view.

The Descent & The View

Curated Exhibition
2016

The exhibition that followed, The Descent & The View, takes its name from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where a group of chained prisoners are only able to see the shadows cast from the world outside the cave. They are unknowing viewers of images without the means of seeing the objects which create the shadows. In Plato’s allegory, Socrates and Glaucon ponder a freed prisoner ascending out of the cave, able to view the illuminated world that caused the shadows that they perceived as reality. Alternatively, for this exhibition, the viewer descends into a “black-box” gallery and views images that have been altered by the devices that create them.
The Descent and the View is a group exhibition of work by contemporary artists: Daniela Meier, Switzerland; Tobias Becker, Germany; Ryland Fortie, Lino Caputo and Maki Mastika from Canada. Their work deals fundamentally with the alternative creation or use of the image by rethinking: the form of presentation (Mastika, Becker), the form of the signal (Caputo, Fortie), or the process of copying (Meier).

The modifications made to the images in The Descent and the View enables phenomenon and theoretical ideas to be visualized. For example, Fortie’s Oscilloscope visualizes the waveforms of sound, or, Caputo’s Her which conceptualizes the glitch of gender definitions visualized as a fragmented image.This experimentation with the components that underlie representation underscores each artist's particular aesthetic sensibility and supports the content of their work.
This exhibition, like Luminocity and other new-media platforms, seeks to expand the use of images and the way they are created. In doing so, artists such as the one’s included in this exhibition introduce new ways of perceiving and understanding what we define an image and the objects which they are shadows of.
-Levi Glass, Curator