So.So.So. Somebody, Somewhere, Some Time
So.So.So. is an interactive installation that plunges the onlooker in the middle of the moment the one of photography which reveals a complex network of characteristic signs from our own experience of reality. What the visitor finds with the help of VR binoculars is a series of spherical panoramas which depict a moment, the same one, at 7.47 in the morning in different places involving different persons in different situations.
Somebody, Somewhere, Some Time.
Exploring these situations, the onlookers’ eyes linger on specific details. They quickly glance at others desperately in quest of a meaning in the apparent banality of the scene. When they focus onto an element of the picture they slide from one scene to another. So doing, they conjure up the transitions, understanding the editing, now created, of which they are the involuntary cause. Thus sliding from one topic to another, from one thing to another, they do not at once understand that, what is actually displayed on the screen is their very own story that is being written.
As a matter of fact, on a wide screen -being discovered by the audience outside the action- is the trace of the onlooker’s eyes painting the path of each visitor at their own pace. This is the ‘Collective Retinal Memory’ , a writing space, a dynamic palimpsest, in which, for some time, spreads out the story of the discovery, a particular reading that becomes a collective experience then. It is on the screen that can be seen the difference of the interpretations readable through the story of the moments of the individual attention.
From the Internet other readings are being developed simultaneously. The same pictures can be seen on line. The path of the Web users is written onto the Retinal Me m ory that beco m es unique, displayed in real ti m e in the exhibition and on de m and on the Net.The shared writing space and the confronted looks m ake So.So.So. a thrilling experience in which the obscenity of the others ongoing looks is unveiled by the CRM that, so doing, uncovers the inti m ate tropisms. This obscenity competes with the necessary complicity which reveals itself amid the fusion of the looks in a collective dynamic picture. In this non linear apparatus, the linearity of the narrative is built up by a chronology of individual experiences that erases an older trace, for a better transcription of a real time of the action.
Woody Vasulka and Steina reacting from inside to Maurice Benayoun’s interactive installation : So. So. So. Somebody, Somewhere Some Time.
To see live online demo of the artwork here.