MetaPlex essay

MetaPlex is a navigable virtual space containing different types
of audible and visual titles. These include still and moving images
and interactive computer artworks. The projectedimagery of the
installation results from the viewers’ actions as well as from stored
titles. Viewers traverse the virtual space using simple hand controls,
encountering the contents as a collection or, upon closer inspection,
at high resolution. MetaPlex enables more than browsing a collection
of film and video art: rather, viewers move in a meta-medium within
which the frames of a film can be navigated as easily as the space
of a building - like Malraux’s Musee Imaginaire - a museum without
walls. MetaPlex was also shown at ICA London, ICC, Tokyo/Japan and
Lothringer13Munich/Germany.
Implemented as an interactive projection for several viewers,
MetaPlex provides a viewing experience in which imagery and
sounds produced in the installation space result from viewers’
actions as well as from stored texts. Viewers traverse the virtual
space using simple hand controls, encountering the contents as a
collection or, upon closer inspection, on their original terms. The
perceived location of sounds, such as the sound-track of a video,
moves around the real installation space according the viewers’
movements about the virtual space: sounds emanating from behind
and to the sides sustain a sensory presence even when they are out
of view. The installation enables more than the museal surveying of
images: rather, viewers traverse a meta-medium within which the
frames of a film can be navigated as easily as the pictures on the
wall.
MetaPlex delivers both compressed documentation from existing archives and photographs or video at the same resolution as the original. Some texts are themselves interactive virtual environments - computer artworks within which viewers
can move and which respond to their actions. And these, which
are synthesised from the same data and algorithm used by the
artist, might claim to be original. Unlike a conventional collection
though, the location of materials may be altered to allow their
comparison side by side, or to suite a particular audience, and unlike
conventional moving imagery, the viewer can move freely forward
or backward at any speed within film or video for review, or to locate
a particular shot or frame.
Some of the work included in Metaplex:
Perry Hobermann:
Computer artwork: Bar Code Hotel, Lang:Metropolis, Griffith:Birth Of
A Nation, Griffith:Intolerance, Eisenstein:Battleship Potemkin, Chris
Cunningham: Come to Daddy /All is full of love, BBC: Dr Who: Planet
of the Daleks, BBC: Blake’s 7: Space Fall, ZKM Infermental collection/
ICA collection, ( Institute of contemporary Art): 15 titles
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MetaPlex 2002-2005
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MetaPlex, Futurecinema, ICC/Tokyo, 2003
MetaPlex, Futurecinema, ZKM Karlsruhe/Germany 2003