influence, habit & agency
Ella Phillips
Architecture of the multiple
J.J. Gibson’s research into design affordances and Jeremy Till’s writings on the cultural impacts of architectural design, have been useful in broadening my research into the politics of display and in the development of Spatial Narratives (video installation, 2015). Multiscreen installations have now become a technique for processing oppositional ideas. Hito Steyerl writes: “Cinema itself explodes into multiplicity—into spatially dispersed multiscreen arrangements that cannot be contained by a single point of view. The full picture, so to speak, remains unavailable” (Is a Museum a Factory? 2009). The multiple and the multitude, the shifting values of the image from materiality to condensed zip files, reflect the way information is now digested and emphasis placed on communication or time-value.
My recent video installation, and accompanying website, demand that your consumption of time be slowed down and focussed. Time-based mediums create a space or khôra where I can ask you to reflect on external influences. Katrina Palmer, Cally Spooner and Keith Piper have successfully shown how multiple forms can be used to access the same individual artwork; including prose, performance and installation. Piper’s Relocating the Remains, comprised a gallery exhibition, monograph, interactive CD-Rom and an online project. ‘In the case of this project, the act of 'relocation' takes on multiple meanings. In a literal sense, the relocation becomes from physical to virtual space.' I have come to adopt I have come to adopt this multi-form, multiscreen manner of working to undermine an overarching authority and create artworks that can enter into nuanced, lacuna spattered conversations with each other.