ARCHIVE : this was the end

ARCHIVE: This Was The End  is at once an artifact and experience — the afterlife of a performance as interactive sculpture. Here, you are the actor, and a wall — salvaged from the old PS 122 community center — is the physical manifestation of a memory of a play, which your presence activates and disrupts. Sound and video portraits embedded and mapped onto the wall produce a reverse relief. What is far seems near and near, far. The past hypnotizes the present, denying its erasure, to remind us of a life before that continues.

Upon entering the space , you see a 16’ x 7’ x 4’ old schoolhouse wall with sliding blackboards and cabinets, standing in the middle of the room. Video projects the structure onto itself, layering the pre-recorded past onto the present object you are navigating. Unlike the performance, you can walk around it, to discover projections on the backstage side and walk through it to follow the moving video portraits that emerge and recede. Inside you discover its inner workings -- Crane’s hands mixing cassettes tapes, above which are two small surveillance monitors of the front and back of the structure. You can stand where Crane stood and watch him mix the work you are experiencing. The sound localizes the actor’s voices, who are now absent, relative to their position in the video.  The opening and closing of the doors allows you to change the image and adjust them to match the video as it shifts with the characters’ movements. Sensors on certain doors expands Archive’s play of depth and surface and rewards your physical presence and attention. This 50 minutes loop begins and ends with a timelapse of the wall being built and then dismantled. 

ARCHIVE  is a three channel video installation with six channels of distributed sound that runs n a 50 minutes loop. This multi media work spans video, sound, portraiture, interactive design, sculptural installation and architectural archive.  This  free running  gallery installation can also be activated and played in a hour-long concert by sound artist G Lucas Crane.


The following video shows the same scene in the performance and then in the installation.