trans-border: primitive man@edge of virtual forest / hyaku-take
Installation / Performance with False Alarm
TOPOS Gallery: Austin, TX 1996
Inspired by and subtitled after the Japanese-named comet in flight at the time of the work, hyakutake (one hundred bamboo stalks), the gallery installation is representational of earlier “elevated nature” works. The 50’w x 60’l x 11’h installation internalized previous installation / projection / performances from Resurrection Project: Four Stations and electronic wind.
The installation was organized on a uniform grid within the gallery dimensions, and bamboo stalks were vertically compressed between two pieces of threaded rod between the floor and metal z-purlins. Culms of bamboo attached horizontally in askew lines provided an armature for copper screen and scrim, which marked, divided and mapped space with various data/media while impeding direct movement..
The scrim became a screen for LCD video and slide projections, resulting in layers of varying density depending on the amount of scrim being projected through and the projectors’ distances from them. Two audio tapes defined the space as well. One, underneath the concrete second floor, of a babbling brook, and the other, overhead in the steel z-purlins, of border transit eighteen–wheelers crossing an overpass, placing an additional overlay of “trans-border” within the space.
The audience/participants had to consciously navigate through the physical space and the virtual spaces of projections and sounds. This heightened the tension between the primitive, physical body, and the virtual, immaterial body emerging in electronic environments. The gallery space became a space for exploring this relation of physical space to virtual spaces and physical bodies to data/media bodies.
A closing performance by False Alarm (a dance troupe from San Antonio) activated the installation with slide projections and LCD video projections of the Resurrection Project Performance. False Alarm’s projection/performance engaged the striated nature of the space through extremely slow and controlled movements that exemplified the reduced capacity of the body to passively engage such a space; they were primitive bodies at the edge of the virtual forest of the displaced bamboo and technological projections.
The static space of the gallery was marked and made dynamic by the installation and activated by the accompanying multi–sensory experience of the moving video projections, sound, and display of human interaction with the work.
