Paul Sermon commission for THEpUBLIC
Early in the New Year we will begin documenting Paul Sermon’s development of a new commission for the opening of THEpUBLIC museum in West Bromwich, UK http://www.thepublic.com/.
Telematic Embrace will be a permanent installation in place from August 2006.
These images from Paul’s prospectus for the project are from Telematic Vision (1992), which inspires this new work.
Paul’s site-specific installations employ telematics to explore mutual interaction and user-determined narrative between remote participants.
Participants interact with others in physically dispersed sites by observing their own ‘human avatar’ representations in a telepresent space.
Paul describes how this is enabled:
Through the use of live chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology these divided audience participants enter a video installation and initially suppose they entering a passive space - sitting, standing or sometimes lying within it. Their presence within the space is recorded live on video camera and mapped in real-time, via a chroma-key video mixer, with an identical camera view of another participant in an identical installation space – combining two shots of live action by replacing a blue or green back drop in one image with the image of the other. The two spaces which can be any geographical distance apart are linked via a videoconference connection, making it possible to link and combine these telematic installations and their performing audiences between almost any location in the world.
These installations provoke an uncanny sense of presence in conflations between proximity and distance, intimacy and removal.
Paul argues that:
All technology is a development of language - a means of construction and interpretation of an environment. The definition of the virtual and real are all part of the same linguistic construct. Technology/language is not an apparatus or attachment of the body, but rather an extension of it.
For the user, remote participants come closer in a sense of presence divided between sites, actions and interactions.
Paul’s website is at http://www.paulsermon.org/
A context for this documentation of Paul’s work is already being developed on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/PaulSermon/Home
Images courtesy Paul Sermon.