contact sponge	Room1: Waiting: The visitors enter the waiting room and are given a color-coded ticket. Here, while they await for their number to be announced, they can relax, watch a foreign news broadcast and visit with fellow participants. When the number is announced, with the assistance of an usher, a small group of between 3-7 visitors is led from the waiting area into the next space. Room2: Immersion: As the visitors enter into the darkened and spare immersion space they encounter a world of matter and media. Steel canisters with installed stove-top heating coils stationed around the periphery of the room provide intense warmth in the space while five screen units suspended at different heights project a series of fractured narratives dealing with haunting and the loss of subjectivity within a discontinuous world. The visitors must remain in the space for a set time duration, moving through multiple fields simultaneously; erotic experience, solitude and abandonment, deformation and reformation of vision from crumbled media. Room3: Control: The control systems of the immersion room are now revealed as visitors step into the next space. Here, the visitors are given the priviledged point of view into a nexus of information, control and surveillance. The visitors can observe the operation of the computer controlled sound and video appratuses, revealed by the presence of performer/operators interfaced to this equipment as well as confront both live and tape delayed surveillance recordings of the waiting room. The visitors can also witness a computer generated flythough of the immersion space, further destabilizing their understanding of the real/virtual and performer/spectator. Room4: Threshold: The visitors proceed through a long narrow corridor on their way to the exit space. Here they see, suspended above them, two video monitors with each of the narratives from the immersion space played through as 8 minute loops in their original, chronological order. The disjunctive video fragments of the immersion space now give way to two separated stories, running in parallel with each other. Room5: Threshold: In the final space, the visitors undergo a further perspectival shift: here, video is projected onto the far wall. In this case, however, select images from the video narratives undergo a violent decomposition and reconstruc- tion through the elements of heat and film. Faced with this deeper instability of media and image, the visitors are free to enter the world anew or cycle through the event again.				click on the stills below to view quicktimes... Room1: Waiting Room2: Immersion Room3: Control Room4: Threshold Room5: Threshold
	M2 Replay gallery
	contact sponge

© sponge 1997 - 2002