Video projectors, televisions, loudspeakers, screens. Videos by Lia.
September to October 2005, Solar Galeria de Arte Cinemática, Vila do Conde. Project supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, the Portuguese Institute of the Arts, and Curtas Metragens CRL.
We approached the complex space of the Solar gallery — with several rooms and corridors, with indoors and outdoors areas — as a canvas for the audience to move through the work. Rather than giving a static audience a dynamic performance or a predefined temporal sequence on a recording, we wanted to build a composition where the movement of visitors would be instrumental in defining what and how would be experienced. We wanted to create a piece that was a place that audiences could discover through acts of ergodic exploration.
In 30×1 visitors found multiple sources of sound and images. Each of these sources would asynchronously project a series of audiovisual objects with a duration of circa one minute; these were organised in five sets distributed through the space. The thirty sources varied from video projections in hanging screens to television sets of various sizes, with the sound projected in varied ways, from stereo speakers to internal speakers of the television sets. Some of the sources were in dark and resonant spaces, some in outdoor areas where lighting conditions would vary during the day, some were visible from afar, some could only be heard and not seen from some points of view.
The audiovisual objects were created as a modular system in which each one could be visually or sonically overlaid with other objects. The audience’s discovery of the piece would then be an act of constructing their reading through the juxtaposition of objects. The exploration of the space became an act of assemblage and of construction within the phase-space of the installation. As the sound echoed and resonated from room to room, images were also either juxtaposed in the same rooms, sometimes in adjacent spaces, sometimes barely visible, at the end of a corridor, or through a window. Unlike performances or linear compositions created for albums or videos, this piece had no start or end. It was open and entirely shaped by the visitors’ movements, attention, and drift.
Thank you to João Cruz, Miquel Bernat, Nuno Tudela, Paulo Vinhas, Isabel Abreu.