spectacle [video|sound, 2005]
Transforming documentary footage from the 9.11 NY attacks in 2001, this piece explores the dimension of the split-screen to align visual and political dislocations. The "event" comes to us through the media, thus becoming a spectral experience conveyed through the mechanical horizon of our television screens. The work embodies the viewer and the viewed - the mesmerised stare of an onlooker situated next to the chaotic vortex of people. The sound is a collage created from the immediate event. The historic and histrionic contend with one another. This queries how we encounter our realities, through the blurring of two time horizons: the natural and the virtual. As onlookers of the spectacle through somebody else's eyes, we are a further remove from the event itself. This distancing subjects us to a kind of soporific immersion, passive and nightmarish, and like transfixed viewers we are spectators of the spectral.
