Chris Dodge: The Winds that Wash the Seas
Artist(s):
Title:
- The Winds that Wash the Seas
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 1995
Medium:
- Interactive Installation
Category:
Keywords:
Artist Statement:
With this installation, I was interested in developing alternative “soft” computer interfaces based on natural media. These devices, compared to traditional interfaces, are imprecise and vague, capturing only the gestural essences of the user’s interactions. Air and water, with their innately ethereal properties, suit the thematic exploration of the installation’s content, where the viewer creates, via real-time image processing software, a dialectic between the icons of societal identities – architecture – and the fleeting first-person experiences contained within these structures. Through the non-linear dynamics of these two fluid media, viewers can only provide impulses, via stirring water in the tub or blowing air onto the monitor, to a complex natural system that propagates beyond their control. The futility of the human intervention is compounded by the fact that there are neither goals nor states in the system; the viewer’s presence is as transient as the visual content and interface media. A final irony: not only do we perturb the system, the work leaves traces of itself: wet hands and shortness of breath.
