Luminous Point

2006

 interactive video

SD video, 90:00', stereo, 

video projector, media player, speakers, dimensions variable

The interactive video Luminous Point presents an artistic look at memory. Mental space is imaged as digital architecture and cultural and personal recollection as contemplative travel therein. The stage for the journey is a digital recreation of my Lower East Side tenement apartment, turned into a mnemonic architecture, a virtual Wunderkammer, in which distant places and different times, personal biography and cultural history, science and art, fact and fiction all coexist like in the mental space of memory. Luminous Point draws from the whole gamut of digital expression, encompassing narrative and documentary video/film, computer game, Quicktime virtual reality, sound synthesis, and photography. Navigating per remote control, the visitors pass through a labyrinth of spaces, descend into subterranean worlds, effortlessly change between microscopic and macroscopic dimensions, lift off skywards like dreamers, free from the binds of gravity and linear time. They encounter Cavendish‘s gravity experiment, watch the rise and fall of the airship Zeppelin, peer through a shard of Duchamp‘s glass into the microbial world on the skull of a decapitated 19th century bandit, enter an abandoned Spanish shed, the distressing scene of a poisoning of dogs, exit, cross a river, continue as passengers in a jet plane, and tunnel back into the apartment, each time fashioned from different visual relics.