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screaMachine
@ Moving Image Gallery
November
30th - December 21st 2000
Gearoid Dolan a.k.a. screaMachine will be presenting new
works in a digitally generated, projected environment
at Moving Image Gallery, New York’s formost new media
space. There are 6 pieces being presented, one physical
and 5 ephemeral, time-based works.
1.‘City View’ is a series of laser prints
on acetate which act as a ‘stained glass’ window.
The piece is located in the window of the gallery and
acts as the only non electric light source and the only
connection to the outside world. Each panel depicts a
computer collaged interior of a real New York apartment,
complete with the personal accoutrements of the inhabitants
and headless (anonymous) people, going about their daily
lives at home. Unlike a regular ‘view’ of the
city from the outside, this piece portrays the city as
an amalgam of individuals, living in colorful, chaotic
environments. Mostly obscured, the real city is viewable
through the piece.
2.‘Drag’ is an interactive projected
work that occupied the floorspace in front of ‘City
View’. It depicts an image of an open Bible which,
when scrubbed digitally by a computer operator, is erased
to reveal a portrait of the artist and wife, naked, lying
in an embrace on a bed of deep red fabric. This scrubbing
takes place during the performance of the piece, which
involves the naked artist dragging a bible, attached by
a cord to his penis, across the image. The computer operator,
the artist’s wife, tracks the route of the bible
with the erase tool, giving the apearance of the bible
erasing the image. Working together the artist and wife
reveal the underlying image.
3.‘Without You’ also consists of a projected
moving computer image which comes alive by means of performance.
The naked artist stands still with right hand raised and
left hand ‘supporting’ a circular projection
on his chest. Colorful animations of images of his wife’s
skull and brain, generated from CAT and MRI scans, inhabit
the circle while a 3D human heart rotates on his right
palm. A musical score, techno/drum’n’bass style,
reiterates the phrase ‘Without You’. The work
revels in the state of love between the artist and wife
by lamenting the wife’s ficticious death.
4.‘Entertainment’ combines two simultaneously
projected video streams, one made up of soundbytes from
T.V., the other a computer animated interpretation of
those same bytes. During performance the artist sits,
remote control in hand, and watches a large scale projection
of the T.V. footage, endlessly flicking channels, while
the animations are projected in sync onto the back of
his shaved head. The viewer has to choose between watching
the original footage on the wall or the interpreted version
on the artists scalp. The interaction between the two
video feeds and the performer lends for a scathing, and
humorous commentary on the entertainment industry.
5.‘Urban Junglism’ is a projected work
from the series ‘Technophobia’, which deals
with the real and paranoid fears of the techno-revolution.
Like, ‘Without You’, it also uses a techno/drum’n’bass
score to structure its content. ‘Urban Junglism’
presents images of the artist in his home neighborhood,
(East Village, New York since 1987) performing grafitti
‘acts’, using the slogan “Information Divide
= Class War”. Combined with footage of police surveillance
and computer generated motion graphics, it presents an
image of a future inhabited by a techno-inhanced invasive
police force and urban rebels trying to break down the
technological barrier. It predicts an underclass of non-computer
literate citizens, with hackers as the only hope for constraining
the facist tendencies of corporate industry. Like many
of the other works presented, ‘Urban Junglism’
is brought into hyper-focus during a performance; here
the artist simply walks in front of the screen and spray
paints the same slogan onto the screen and exits.
6.‘Score for a Techno-Cathedral’ is a
surround sound, computer generated soundtrack that serves
to combine all the above pieces into one, when the performances
are not in progress. Each piece exists as a stand alone
projected installation when not being performed. ‘score
for a techno-cathedral’ acts as a force to make the
room into one large installation; it uses phrases and
audio bytes from all the works along with synthetic sounds
to create an atmospheric room score. In this ‘installation’
phase, the individual works do not have their soundtracks
running, with the execption of ‘entertainment’
which can be heard at low volume and at low quality out
of the built-in speaker on one of the two data projectors
in the piece. ‘score for a techno-cathedral’
moves audio around the room and disparate phrases, evoking
aspects of the different works, emerge from different
locations.
As a single installation, the show, simply titled ‘screaMachine’
(the name used by the artist in all artistic endeavors)
takes on the theme of ‘supernatural light’ as
used by the creators of cathedrals. Stained glass windows
and the sonorous echoing of vast chambers to produce non-natural,
man-made atmospherics were deemed appropriate reflections
of the wonderous nature of their god(s). In this show
the pieces form a sequence, starting with the more traditional
stained glass-like ‘City View’ to the religion
defying ‘Drag’, through the introspective ‘Without
You’ to the new god/new technology as depicted in
‘Entertainment’ and finally on to the rejection
of the new god as structured by the forces of control
in ‘Urban Junglism’. ‘Theme’ unites
all by the juxtaposition of their contributing elements.
In total the exhibit propounds that the search for a god
or philosophical inquiry is inherently constrained and
influenced by the technology on the times.
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