Today Taylor, an American friend from the dorm, and I went to the exhibit of the artists that I met on Tuesday (see entry). I was extremely impressed with their work. It combined insight and enjoyability and was largely interactive.

Many of the works involved filtering live video feed. One really interesting piece was a red pair of sunglasses. The lenses were identical colorful screens displaying video from a camera fixed between the two of them. However, the glasses also were a deluxe speaker system and the lenses doubled as graphic equalizers. There was a button to change which visual effect was being used. So, for example, you could stand there and wave and a psychedelically colored mirror of yourself would wave back, with the colors pulsing to the beat of the music. This same pieces had been hanging on the wall of the studio, but I only saw one of the visual effects there. Some of the others were green and black or concentric circles—hard to describe, but very interesting.

Perhaps my favorite piece was a very simple concept that I had overlooked in our first pass through the gallery, but on the way back around caught my attention. There were two smallish screens, about the size of maybe a laptop monitor only square, that transitioned between white and black. The transitions were taken from programs like powerpoint but slowed down to a full thirty seconds each. Now, imagine standing and watching any of those transitions you’re so familiar with—wipe, blinds, etc.—extended to thirty seconds and at the end nothing unexpected is revealed. You might expect it to be unbearable, but it had the hypnotic power of a lava lamp once you took the time to watch. What I found most interesting was how the brain began to fill in three-dimensionality where there was none, creating images or form. Many of the displays were interactive in the way that you perform some action and the display responds. This was interactive in a very internal, mental way; it provided the outline and the mind filled in the imagery.

Another impressive work was a stock ticker draped into a garbage can in the fluid and overflowing manner of a reel of film. The stock ticker was actually displaying current news stories, but it made obvious the short life span of any news story.

On the way out, Taylor and I realized that we had spent all our time on the top floor and that there was more art on the lower floors (we’d misunderstood a guard’s instructions when we came in), but we had already agreed to go out for tea and couldn’t stay to investigate them.

Update: I went back to the gallery and saw the remaining floors. Entry here.