My project is a three channel interactive video installation.
I am interested in the cyclical nature of violence. I am approaching this exploration through a tight lens. The lens of Franz Fanon, and particularly I’ll be pointing to his text The Wretched of the Earth. However it goes a bit deeper then that. The task of addressing something so huge is better treated at the individual level. Once the audience is invested the unique or sometimes idiosyncratic aura that the artist has created is allowed to slowly echo out so that it gets bigger and bigger, translating into a collective experience.
The videos will be projected on three pieces of plexiglass arranged in a row. The two projections surrounding the middle screen will play the same footage. The center piece of this footage will be images from vietnam. As well most of the footage on these screens will be archival material, depicting certain glimpses of violence. The first projection will be played forward and the third project(on the other side of the middle screen) will be played backwards. This again represents the cyclical nature of violence that I am addressing.
These two projections set the tone–they create the context with which to read this work in its entirety.
The middle projection is the video that has interaction. This projection starts with just a man looking out at the audience. As soon as you enter his line of sight (the distance which is set via opencv: face detection) he begins to address you.
He rants, he questions you sternly, and then tries to coerce you to twist a nob that is integrated into a pedestal. The nob is a potentiometer. As the viewer twists the nob, he sort of reenacts the essence of the Milgram experiment.
I will attempt to weave the webs of violence from personal histories outward to embrace collective histories..
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