Carleton Cinema & Media StudiesFall, 2010 | Prof. John Schott

APPARITIONSSITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA PROJECTS

Illustration: Sylvian

SamDUNNEWOLD

AlexanderCARRUTHERS

ChristianFOSTERAbagailHAN

JonHUGHESJamesMUNSON

KaitlinRANDOLPHSamSCHERF

MerylSCHUMACKERJamesonSIEGERT

MatthewSPEVACKKateTRENERRY

AnnaWADAYuanpuWANG

CathleenWOLF

APPARITIONS PROJECTION PROJECTMUSIC & DRAMA CENTER PLAZAOCTOBER, 2010

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA is about jumping off the cinema screen and catapulting out of the flickering blue tube with installation-style works located in surprising corners of the world. Site-specific media responds to, comments on, or otherwise alters the spaces in which it is installed.

Included here are representative projects from two public presentations by the Site-Specific Media Class offered by Professor John Schott of Carleton’s Department of Cinema & Media Studies in the fall of 2010.

APPARITIONS [October, 2010] included projection projects on the plaza and surrounding buildings of the Music & Drama Center that lit up the the night on a beautiful autumn evening.

WORKOUT VIDEOS [November, 2010] was presented in a variety of spaces in the Carleton Rec Center—notably the Racquetball Courts—in an evening presentation.

Location: Southwest corner of the Concert Hall. Lower left: Alexander Carruthers. Above center: Sam Scherf. Upper right: James Munson.

ALEXANDER CARRUTHERS Number Eighty-Four

SAM SCHERF Crossing A Corner

JAMES MUNSON A(uto/cous)matic

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

I was inspired by the architecture of the Concert Hall, and created a projection of animated particles falling into the spaces between the building's windows.

During the planning phase of this project, I was struck by how much the architecture of the Concert Hall resembles massive science lab beakers.  I decided to take that idea, amplify it, and fill the building's "beakers"

with particles of different sizes and colors.  The beakers filled with particles, emptied, and refilled at different rates. There were water droplets (which accumulated slowly), colored cubes (which filled and refilled quickly), stars, sand, and more.  My goal was to highlight the architecture in a new way, with media that was fun, whimsical and easy to watch.

MERYL SCHUMACKER Falling Particles

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

JAMES MUNSON A(uto/cous)matic

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

This piece consisted of a large scale, single-channel projection on the brick wall of the Carleton College Concert Hall.  The visual content of the projection was primarily based on a video portrait of an acousmatic experience: a headphoned man listening to an electronic dance track, with the audio being played live for the audience. The site of this piece, though augmented by the presence of the Concert Hall, was intended to be discursively defined within the field of sound theory; specifically, I

wanted to continue a standing dialogue over the changing relationship and accessibility a contemporary audience has to the nature and origin of individual electronically rendered sounds within the context of increasingly complex sound production techniques.  Of my audience, I wanted to ask: how does your relationship to a sound or performance change when the origin of that sound is unknown or unclear?

MATT SPEVACK The Eye of Destruction

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

This projection––nine individual short videos that played simultaneously in an organized grid system––was mounted to a tree outside the concert call and projected down onto a square cement grid below. The image was cast on a white bed sheet which billowed up from the grate and created an almost apparitional experience when coupled with the gusts of air that viewers would face as they looked down at the film. The content of each video demonstrated “destruction” in a myriad of ways––from the most literal of visual cues (a hand crushing an orange) to more contemplative and metaphorical, even textual, ideas such as “pleasure”

written in coffee grinds on a wall. This piece was very much site-specific, possibly even site-reliant as the projection not only transformed the once uneventful and often ignored grate into a site of sensory awe and social gathering but also added some much needed life to an otherwise dead projection. The installation was almost more about the light, the wind, and the sound than it was about the content of the video––an almost fantastical and spiritual presence emerging from a dark and unnoticed corner of campus.

ABBY HANKAITLIN RANDOLPHKATE TRENERRYANNA WADA Ghosts of Gridley

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

We projected archival photographs of Gridley Hall—a women's dorm that was on the site of the concert hall until Oct. 23, 1967—on to the walls of the Concert Hall, in order to juxtapose the memory of this space with how the site is used today. The photographs of Gridley and its destruction are taken from the Carleton Archives. Another projector was used for a moving image of ghostly figures, projected onto the archival photographs.

This was a project that was dependent on both place and time. Our show took place the night before the 43rd anniversary of Gridley's Destruction. Furthermore, the arena theater is to be taken down as the new Arts

Union is constructed – the cycle of construction and destruction in the past could be viewed in context of the future demolishing of the theater.Finally, our project responded to the architecture of the space by projecting onto the windows of the concert hall to obtain a large reflection of our images. This technique allowed us to incorporate buildings and the lights of the entire space, conceptually and physically tying our project to the site.

For audio, we used a track of footsteps and destruction noise as the background.

ALEX CARRUTHERS Number Eighty-Four

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

My concept for this piece was really to stretch and blend various media, taking traditional forms, modifying them and adding others in order to create a project for the new digital age. Number Eighty-Four started with the idea of a moving still life.

This would allow me to juxtapose high art and new media work into a single projection project. It begins with a framed moving still life followed by a new media collage of clips from films, videos and text.

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

Our installation transformed the Dance Studio into a space to ReThink what we consider "dance".  We projected 6 videos of an aerobics class into a block of 6 cubbyholes, surrounded by several bouncy hemispheres as seating and accompanied by upbeat workout music. Two other projections of Jane Shockley's Contact Improvisation class occupied the space, reflected and distorted multiple times in the mirrors with meditative music and Jane's voice giving instructions and feedback.  

One of these projections was able to swirl around the room and "paint" the space with contact improv. Yoga mats and exercise balls were scattered about the room for the audience to interact with the environment. The way in which we displayed these two forms of dance (structured and organized vs. expressive and ambiguous) reflects their attitude towards dance. Yet when put together in the same room they clearly share a common love for the spirit of movement.

ABIGAIL HANANNA WADACASEY WOLF

[ReThinking Dance]

JAMES MUNSONSAM SCHERFMATT SPEVACK Psychedelia SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

For our site-specific recreation center installation piece, we wanted to emulate the psychedelic art movement of the 1960's through a Vanderbeek-esque moviedrome experience. Our four channel projection transformed a racquetball court, what was essentially a "white cube," into an overwhelmingly sensory evening of psychedelic light and sound.  Video content was created with contours of the space in mind, and

projections were arranged to introduce bizarre and exciting contrasts in color, scale and sheared-perspective.  Each channel of video was looped at varying lengths to add a probabilistic component to the performance.  The result was the Psychedelihedron: equal parts delight, fear, confusion and absurdity. [Left: Matt Spevack; Right: James Munson]

KAITLIN RANDOLPH Groove

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

For my project I chose three songs that I had composed and paired each separate note in each piece with a different action word and color. As each note played, its accompanying word leaped up on the screen. All of the chosen words had something to do

with movement and the rec center, for example: climb, run, bike, dance, etc. The words darted rapidly across the screen so viewers' eyes followed at the same vigor that the movement of the words suggested.

KATE TRENERRY The Cave

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

Much as explorers once discovered cave paintings by casting the light of a torch on the walls, visitors to the Bouldering Cave at the Rec Center discovered an invisible reality with the sweep of an iPhone. I used an augmented reality iPhone application called Layar to place 2D cave paintings in virtual space. The cave paintings were only be visible with the use of the Layar app on an iPhone. Users were able to hold the iPhone, and its camera, when pointed in the right place, would display a variety of images that were not visible to the human eye on the iPhone screen. To design and place the images, I used third-party software called Hoppala Augmentation which allows users to places files at exact GPS coordinates.

My installation also featured a video, projected from the top of the bouldering walls. The 30 clip was played on a loop and showed a burning

torch swung through the air, followed by a hand swinging an iPhone in the opposite motion. In between these sequences, I incorporated shots from an claymation version of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. An accompanying audio track played sounds of a burning torch, wind, and the echo of dripping water, along with sound bytes from the claymation video. The narrators' deep voice prompted visitors every thirty seconds, "imagine prisoners that have spent their entire lives chained, deep inside a cave." The clip concludes with the earlier shots of the torch and iPhone overlaid so they meet exactly on the right-center of the screen. This video neatly summarized the concept behind the installation, providing users with instructions for interaction, creating an immersive experience, and relating to larger philosophical questions of reality and virtual reality, also suggested by the virtual cave paintings and the collision of the ancient and modern within the space.

JONATHAN HUGHES Optics

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

In Optics, a vintage telescope was positioned at the top of the stairs in the recreation center with an iPod mounted on the opposite wall. By looking through the telescope, a viewer could find and watch the video, which consisted of a man sitting on a couch, only occasionally moving. By creating an intentional confusion about whether the image was still or moving, the piece encouraged interaction between multiple viewers.

Because they could only view the video one at a time, and it was a five minute loop, two people who approached the piece together might experience the video in a different way – one seeing movement, the other seeing a still image. The disagreement and debate this could provoke was the ultimate goal of the piece. [Left: Joey Fishman; Right: Jonathan Hughes]

YUANPU WANG The Diner

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

I set out to translate my fear of red meat and extreme eating behaviorism on photo, I started to imagine a project where heavy theatricality and immaculate studio control would produce something for “the camera eye”. But I soon felt it was too artificial and useless. The performance needs to push the inner atrophy of emotions out of the superfluous and controlled script/materials/props.

I provided the actors with a few lines of script, some organic steak and sharp cutlery and dinnerware, and asked them to undress. In the end, the highly self-conscious actors were challenged and disturbed by how much sensation one can inflict on another. The three photographs are what I felt a portal, a box, the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland that lure me to continue to create something more permanent.

MERYL SCHUMACKERWho Says Paint Has to Come in a Can?

SITE-SPECIFIC MEDIA

Historically, the Carleton Water Tower has been a forbidden canvas: elaborate student attempts to paint the surface have always been “corrected” by Facilities.  For my final project, I decided to “paint” the Water Tower with projected light, transforming it into a multimedia billboard.  The title of my piece, “Who Says Paint Has to Come in a Can?” transformed the classic prank into non-destructive art.

The projection itself was a reel of still images, video clips, text and

animation.  The visuals centered on the theme of Carleton students’ self-expression, with content ranging from student video projects and photography, to student-suggested graffiti (e.g. "42" and "Save Ferris!"). Clips of splashing paint and flickering colors appeared in between, recalling the concept of painting with light. Flashing text, “WHO SAYS PAINT HAS TO COME IN A CAN?” and “HOMAGE TO YOUR INGENUITY,” reiterated the theme.