“What does the word mean today? This, word for over two hundred years was paramount in the imagination of explorers and travellers and synonymous with the often ‘unreal’ manifestations related by those whose accounts were to become recorded as being the objective experiences linking Australia to France”

 

In the exhibition Antipodes I extended the subject beyond its historical definition by considering the ‘antipodes’ as an imaginary space just at the edge of one’s peripheral vision. The video installation, entitled if you were there, presented a specific tension between the real and the imaginary, embodied by the use of video (2-dimensional moving image) and sculpture (3-dimensional form) which was also pertinent to my conception of the theme of the antipodes. The work referred conceptually to the conventional reception of video and television as the dominant medium of escapism. However, here the use of video subverts the realism of television creating no real place to escape; but imperfect worlds in which the viewer must engage in critically.

 

 

The form of video installation is sometimes a difficult medium to respond to as it requires the viewer to interrogate its very constituents of time, space and technology. If you were there used this very difficulty and its proximity to film, which functions on the suspension of disbelief, to explore a historical conception dotted with untruth and distortions. Video installation challenges the predominant modes of perception as practiced and presented in conventional film and television by fusing both video image and sound with sculptural elements. Video art is both familiar (using the same technology as television) and subversive (in its content), so that it causes a constant re-situating of the viewer-object relation; it undermines perceived notions of perspective and provokes a bodily response.

 

If you were there work was set in the corner of gallery as the sole video projection in the room. It had a strange presence in the space, both enticing and forbidding. It was a white semi-circular structure that appeared to have had a portion cut out of it (affectionately entitled “camembert” by the French participants of the project)  sitting at eye level. The portion was open to reveal two computer monitors sitting at 70 degrees facing each other and on the two adjacent curved surfaces that make the circle, are projected video images. Formally, the video comprises of four screens – the two monitors and two video projections conjoined by the same stereo soundtrack. The technologically and formally complex  installation creates a cognitive uncertainty in which shots are cut away quickly and frame only parts of the subject instead of the whole through close-ups and selective framing. The viewer’s gaze is never invited to remain entirely focused on the one screen by furtive or disjointed, partial or obscured shots sequences. In a simple evaluation it created rather literally the out-of-field or that which may be seen beyond the single frame, but it is a frustrated experience as the viewer does not have physical access to view all screens fully at the same time.

 

My interrogation of the antipodes was situated within the structure of film and video. If everyday time and space could be seen in a film, its mise-en-scène being one’s usual frame of reference, the shot size its limits and so forth, then the antipodean imaginary would be the out-of field. The out-of-field described by Deleuze in The Movement-Image is that which is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present. So what happens when the out-of–field is rendered visible? This is partially what I attempted to create - the antipodean of everyday life. The four screens represent that which is never, and at the same time, entirely present at any given moment.

 

Each of the four screens display images that oscillate between photography and cinema that causes a disruption and reorientation of time and space. For example, there are instances in the installation where still images are presented but a single screen is in constant flux by the constant panning movement of the camera. Shot in mainly medium close-ups, without an initial establishing shot, the video inserts the viewer into a strange looped montage of shots framing the two characters in a fixed location (a living room) and also indeterminate space (other locations appear). What is raised through these relations between neighbouring monitors is a series of questions regarding the time and space existing between the various monitors. How far are the subjects to each other? What length of time does the video represent? What the viewer is left with is an immediacy of the image and despite the conventional feeling of it representing more time than what is presented (through montage editing), the video feels temporally compact.

 

Formally, the work corresponds to the theme of the antipodes through its unusual cinematic gaze, what the Russian Formalists called de-familiarisation, a breaking open of mechanical perceptive habits. By presenting an impossible image, in this case - a multiplicity of images, the normal physical and psychological workings of perception are destabilized so that there is a cognitive reconstruction of the body.

 

The use of four screens in a kind of double binary format (two monitors and two projections) represents a simple opposition (between two) but one that is complicated by the addition of two more which prevents a natural complicity forming between the contrasting subjects seen in the dual monitor display. What is also presented to the viewer is the revelation that so much is still out of view – further possibilities and thus infinite other out-of-fields, times, spaces and objects all implicated by their absence. So that if indeed there is a limitless field of ideas and content where would the antipodean lie? Historically, it was considered to be the diametrical opposite of where one is situated on earth. Now if I were to create a point on a sphere and set off from this point in any given direction I could by Euclidean spatial logic find the corresponding coordinate that would indicate that I had reached the antipodes. But if I continued the path I would trace a circumference that in fact leads me back to my original position. It is in this circular logic I will go back to the idea of the out-of-field.