SITE SEEING ZOOM
A Performance about Memory
2001
A collaboration between Hotel Pro Forma and the digital art collective Crosscross (France).
The non-linear structure of the network reflects the complex nature of human memory. The performance uses the digital media as tool and as artistic idiom.
Site Seeing Zoom reflects the interplay of man and computer and rejoices at the diversity of the world. We search in the storage of our common memory of the network. The performance abandons itself to the rediscovered material and invents new stories in a constant change between foreground and background, fragment and unity, precision and causal.
Like hovering pilots we travel in the landscape of memory, zoom in and out, change angle, speed and height. We map and catalogue human ways of expression. We use the navigation in a virtual architecture as the composition and the narrative style of the performance. The movements of the travel are projected on screens as sequences of images that are doubled, reflected, and repeated like living memory itself. The audience walks round the cross-structure of the screens and experience the performance from different angles.
Four people, four voices function as portals to the digital universe, as narrators and as representatives of different memory processes. Their stories are written as poems and as statements about life as lived.
What is a worthy human being? They ask from a room in the digital palace.
A guide finds himself between the physical and the virtual world. He is seen as movement, as shadow, and as scale in relation to the projected images.
The sound moves spatially from the one sequence to the other. At the same time, the sound is a landscape and a runway for the four narrators and their guide.
The interplay between the movement of the journey, the signaling of the guide, the position of the audience together with the bodily sound – make the performance.
Duration 66 min.
Lecture series
Based on Site Seeing Zoom Hotel Pro Forma arranged a lecture series:
Albert Gjedde, professor, The BrainMap-Centre, Aarhus University Hospital, discusses the latest brain research results of the consciousness and the memory, as well as the brain research view on the psyche.
Lars Qvortrup, professor, Department of Interactive Media, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, talks about the possibilities of art in a digitilized aesthetic universe with focus on the interference between image and media.
Morten Søndergaard, poet, tells about his work with the texts for Site Seeing Zoom – about the poetic investigations of the many-faceted imaginations of the memory and the brain.