Airlocks & Valences

Airlocks & Valences is an interactive, screen-based media installation experimenting with navigable documents I call scenes. Within these scenes I engineer encounters and vistas for the viewer to navigate, allowing histories to reveal themselves through image and topographical overlays. The materials of construction for these scenes are fragments of digital media culled from a breadth of sources — from cinema and the visual arts to internet video and video game footage. An assumption of the work is that a sort of collective, cultural memory resides in these digital media sources, and that the constructions formed from these memory fragments articulate an allusive and associative expression of an "impersonal" poetic. This artistic strategy has its progenitor in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", the landmark poem which stole fragments of literature — from Dante's Inferno, from Sanskrit texts, from many other sources — to create a singular epic.

Airlocks & Valences is an ongoing work, currently comprised of three scenes created in 2008-2009. The scenes are interconnected, allowing warps from one to the next, so they are experienced as parts of a larger whole. A customized Sony PlayStation 3 game system drives the entire thing ([diagram]). Screen grabs and video of the work are below.