LIVE VIDEO
LIVE VIDEO (outside and inside views), a cinema theater built into Art in General’s storefront space. The screen shows real time footage of the streets outside from five live video feeds, intercut by a switcher. A sound track by Toshio Kajiwara accompanies the “movie.” 2008
Art in General’s Walker Street store front location transformed into a cinema, a fully functional movie theater inside the street level gallery. The theater with plush velvet chairs and red velvet curtains, was the sculptural object in itself and an experiential arena where a change of mind can occur. The viewer had been lured in by the “LIVE” and “VIDEO” blue signs (reminiscent of a porn shop) in windows, then entered a screening room in which the “movie” was permanently showing. The audience had been mostly unaware that the projection was a live video from several feeds culled from cameras recording the street immediately outside the space. Each feed had a different angle and focal length, and all were edited/mixed automatically by a switcher that inserted brief takes at changing intervals, creating an “instant movie.” Most people who visited the installation did not connect the footage on the screen with the fact that they were fed live from the outside. A soundtrack mix emulating several movie genres (from horror to romantic drama) by Toshio Kajiwara provided a sonic environment for the ongoing “movie,” prompting narrative imagination among the audience, setting off chains of unexpected associations and stories. Addressing the conventions of cinema (the spatial arrangement of the audience in relation to the screen, lens angles, aspect ratios, etc.) and collective reception, the project also took on the notion of “reality art” and the street spectacle that is so often favored over a “movie” or an art experience. Employing curiosity and voyeurism, LIVE VIDEO played-off our tendency to project narratives onto everything we see. Unfolding “movie” scenarios included a few lonely souls in the theater on a rainy day looking out onto a wet, empty street or an exuberant crowd of tourists filling the theater watching kids cruising downtown in search of entertainment. As in the traditional cinematic experience, the defining moment of this spectacle was the experience of the collectively shared viewpoint.
