A participatory installation which explores interaction and perception within a multi-sensory environment involving lighting and projection onto optical sheeting, sonic composition, and the viewer’s own reflection.
The installation acts a space for the consideration of intimacy and meditation– both alone and with others that may share the space– through the merging of the viewer’s own reflections articulated through a composition of shifting light and emerging sounds which fill an otherwise dark chamber. Functioning similarly to the classic funfair mirror– the flexible silver two-way mirror sheeting forming an ethereal hanging centrepiece– the work invites the viewer to consider representations of themselves which appear distorted and transient, and which merge with those around them to form ‘new presences’. In this sense the viewer may see themselves multiplied or doubled with another viewer, or find themselves alone in a rare moment of literal reflection providing a contemplative space or eliciting a hallucinatory fantasy bringing forth ideas in neuroscience around the Self and Other.
EXHIBITED AT THE SOUTH LONDON GALLERY, 2016 - view exhibition details.
EXHIBITED AT THE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE TROMSØ KUNSTFORENING FOR INSOMNIA FESTIVAL
Two-way mirror sheeting (1800mm x 3000mm), 2 x programmable DMX lights, 1 x data projector, sound composition, custom software, viewer reflection.
CREDITS:
Residency
Developed whilst on the residency ‘Embedded’ - a Sound and Music composer and creative artist development programme funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
Technical
Custom software by UK electronic musician and creative technologist Spatial. Technical installation by multi-visual designer Dizqo.
COLLABORATOR BIOGRAPHY:
Spatial (Matt Spendlove, UK) is a an electronic musician and multimedia artist from London exploring low frequency vibration with physical intervention through DJ & live performance on Sound Systems and via recorded media, the structural occupation and perception of opti-sonic transmissions through home coded audiovisual installations and the emergent behaviour of chaotic systems by simple rule based repetition through generative design.
Photo by Andy Stagg, South London Gallery
Photo by Andy Stagg, South London Gallery
Photo by Andy Stagg, South London Gallery
Social media photo from private view by @Rebecca Botros
A participatory installation reflecting on life and death within both a meditative and exploratory, and sometimes confrontational space.
Sally Golding works in ‘expanded cinema’, combining film-making with installation and performance. Her work recalls phantasmagorias, the proto-cinematic ‘ghost shows’ first developed in France in the late eighteenth century. For these spectacles, a modified magic lantern would be used to project scary images of skeletons, ghosts, and demons onto walls, smoke and semi-transparent screens, frequently using rear projection. For her installation Out of Body Out of Mind, Golding rear-projects a 16mm film loop of images of ‘the dead’ onto a screen made of sheets of frosted glass and a two-way mirror. As lights flash in the space, viewers will see their own reflections superimposed upon the film projection, becoming ‘ghosts’ themselves. The soundtrack is a collage of musings on the mind and body drawn from old instructional and sound-effects records. A gothic play on presence and absence, the embodied and the virtual, life and death, the work is, like the phantasmagoria itself, neatly situated at the crossroads of science and superstition, philosophy and pulp.
Single 16mm film loop approx. 6mins in portrait 3:4 aspect ratio, two-way mirror, frosted glass laminate, lighting mixer & lights, camera flash units on sensors, electromagnetic pick up, sound composition (Golding & Joel Stern), audience reflection
COMMISSIONED & EXHIBITED BY INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART, AUSTRALIA, FOR FRESH CUT 2010
Listen to the audio as used in the installation
Read an audience members experience of the exhibition in this blog post: Fresh Cut 2010, by Nobody in the Art World
Photo courtesy of Institute of Modern Art, Australia
Photo courtesy of Institute of Modern Art, Australia
Photo courtesy of Institute of Modern Art, Australia
Photo courtesy of Institute of Modern Art, Australia
Photo courtesy of Institute of Modern Art, Australia
Production still used in the making of the work
An intimate installation investigating the theme of autoscopic hallucination, the double and ageing, using 2-way mirror, 16mm film, and the viewer’s own reflection.
Live-cinema artist Sally Golding harnesses the behaviour and properties of light and plays with the classic iconography of the mirror. Her work An Other Face: Spell for Living and Dying sits within her series of film performances and film installations based on the idea of ‘autoscopic hallucination’. In autoscopic hallucination, one sees one’s self as an external object, which can lead to the delusion that one has a double. In folklore and literature, the double (or doppelganger) is a symbolic embodiment of a troubled self or a phantom, and is a means of examining one’s own existence – be it as alive or dead. However, in the everyday, autoscopic hallucination is a form of dangerous disorientation. Previously, Golding has addressed autoscopic hallucination by projecting images onto her own body while exploring a variety of optical functions, such as reflection and refraction. In An Other Face, she projects onto the spectator, making them a screen – an integral component of the work. Such reorganisation of cinematic elements into installation form redesigns the cinematic viewing experience, exposing the typically locked process of beam-audience-screen.
2 × 16mm film projectors & film loop plates, 2 × 3min film loops, two-way mirror, frosted glass laminate, lighting mixer & lights, electromagnetic pick up, audience reflection
COMMISSIONED BY INDEPENDENT EXHIBITIONS, AUSTRALIA, 2009
Photo by Steve Trigg
Photo by Steve Trigg
Photo by Steve Trigg
Photo by Steve Trigg
Photo by Steve Trigg
Private view photos by Sarah Spencer