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Recently, installation art has begun to engage narrative and conceptual language. In my own video installation work, I am interested in using recent technologies, including video, DVD and virtual space. Narratives here include personal constructed histories as well as the experience that the viewer brings to the installation, ultimately completing the sculpture. Much of my own work focuses on the idea of the body in time and space as well as on the use of virtual immersive technologies relating to video and computer graphing. My past experience, however, is more so in experimental and film art. In film, I explored the processes inherent to the medium itself. |
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Installation Art: Concepts in Video Installation & Immersive Environments – Marguerite Harris
Recently, installation art has begun to engage narrative and conceptual language. In my own video installation work, I am interested in using recent technologies, including video, DVD and virtual space. Narratives here include personal constructed histories as well as the experience that the viewer brings to the installation, ultimately completing the sculpture. Much of my own work focuses on the idea of the body in time and space as well as on the use of virtual immersive technologies relating to video and computer graphing.
My past experience, however, is more so in experimental and film art. In film, I explored the processes inherent to the medium itself. By using organic materials, I altered the film’s surface to create shapes and patterns, which expand even beyond the filmic frame.
My interest in video installation then is a transition and development from my work in the experimental film arts. In my installations, I explore the very boundaries between time, space, the body and the machine/filmic apparatus.
In my recent contemporary installations, a human form in shadow, created through projection, often replaces the structure of the human body. Images of grids and lines are superimposed here as well. In these works, there is an image projected through a collapsed sense of time, and one that does not just exist in two-dimensional space, but also as a three-dimensional figure. In such virtual installation art, the role of the viewer becomes that of the performer, as the machine apparatus is employed to project the viewer’s body onto the architecture of the space.
Virtual time here is marked by the creation of a simulated experience authored or created by the viewer. The archiving of information and memory are similarly characteristic of this domain of the virtual arts. The act of watching is replaced by the act of shadow creation for the viewer—a haunting, mirroring apparition within three-dimensional space.
Coded language, graphs and lines are projected onto the architectural space and onto the body here. Instead of the body in the machine, as in the examples of video or film recording, the shadows here exist in three dimensional space and time.
The past, present and future experience exist simultaneously, archived in an area in which the domain of time no longer adheres to the rules of natural order. Hierarchies of images are stored in memory banks. The body is graphed and coded. Narratives exist here reflecting the personal histories and experiences that the viewer brings to the piece.
The question I pose and study with such an installation and immersive environment is: What is this drive to be embodied by the machine? Is it a desire and drive to become our own authors in creating ideal worlds through simulated experiences? Is it a fear of a world speeding vastly out of control? Is it our final effort to maintain some kind of balance by becoming authors of our own experience in a world controlled by our sexual fantasies and basic instinctual drives and desires?
The basic sense of sight here is privileged over that of taste, smell and tactility. Warped spaces and experiences of vertigo are all a part of the virtual.
These are the many concepts and narratives that I have explored in video and computer installation. Through the use of these processes, I hope to better understand the dialogue between art, culture and technocratic civilization.
