Philip Sanders: HT/TB:(ATCWED): Home Theater/Tower of Babel: (After Tatlin Crick and Watson Étant Donnés)

Artist(s):

Philip Sanders

Title:

HT/TB:(ATCWED): Home Theater/Tower of Babel: (After Tatlin Crick and Watson Étant Donnés)

Exhibition:

DAC Online Exhibition 2011: Analogue is the New Digital

Creation Year:

2011

Artist Statement:

HT/TB:(ATCWED): Home Theater/Tower of Babel: (After Tatlin Crick and Watson Étant Donnés): these images are from a series of linked interactive QuickTime VR panoramas projected into a constructed house/sculpture that contains a series of semi-transparent sculptural screens. Viewers can interact with the panorama using a mouse at the front of the house. The screens display and reflect the original images with increasingly abstract results as they reach farther into the sculpture. There are multiple access points to view and interact with the images – a front window and two side windows allow multiple views, and a walkway through the back of the construction enables viewers to actually enter into and participate physically with the images.

HT/TB:(ATCWED) is an interactive installation of processed digital imaging projected onto sculptural screens situated in a construction/house with windows and a walkway. It explores digital and analog interactivity; interactivity as visual choice and interactivity as personal participation and exploration. It is a physical analog of digital interaction and a look at our constructions of ourselves. The piece investigates the idea of an artwork as an assemblage of data, which has multiple ways/routes/methods to access, organize, and observe that collection of information. HT/TB is also an attempt to open up the quantum box, the white room, the idea of a picture as a frame that opens onto reality, so that we can step inside instead of trying to observe it objectively from the outside. It references multiple analog and digital art works, including Tatlin’s “Monument” and Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés”. For example, the central screen echoes the spiral construction of Tatlin’s building, and the light seen directly echoes the illuminated gas, while the reflections and back screens are analogous to the waterfall.