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Statement
INNOVATIVE ASPECT OF THE PROJECT AND PARTICULAR RESEARCH INTEREST:
Live video images of the gallery visitors at the “Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum” in Duisburg Germany were chroma-key mixed with images of visitors standing in the changing rooms at the nearby disused “Ewald/Schlaegel und Eisen” colliery in Herten. The video image of the combined audiences was simultaneously back projected onto a fine wall of water in the shower room, referred to locally as the “Waschkaue”, providing a third interactive space - literally by walking through and touching the projected participants in the water - who were connected by a video camera that distributed real-time images of the water screen projection to all three sites at once. The water screen itself had the advantage of working as a 10% front projection and 90% back projection, allowing us to project two separate images simultaneously from either side of the water.
REACTIONS TO AND EVALUATION OF THE PROJECT:
As the audience entered the Waschkaue space they were faced by life size projections of the public floating “live” in a pool of mist and vapour in the centre of the blacked-out shower room. Moving around towards the back of the space they were confronted again by life size images of naked coalminers (projected documentary video footage) showering just as they once did in the very same Waschkaue. In this collaborative installation with Andrea Zapp it was our intension utilise the site-specific sounds and smells of this context in order to develop and reinstate the ceremonial like camaraderie taking place amongst the showering miners in the form of “buckling” - a local coalminers term for washing the back of a fellow miner. “A Body of Water” allowed our live performing spectators to rein-act and experience this simple, yet complex act in the form an open-ended narrative.
UPDATES OR FOLLOW-UP PROJECTS?
Due to the site-specific nature of the work we have not expanded or updated the project. We have been approached to produce collaborative works based on A Body of Water but have so far been unsuccessful in securing venues and budgets.
(Paul Sermon)
Exhibitions / Presentations
- Connected cities - Kunstprozesse im Urbanen Netz, Essen, 1999
» http://www.connected-cities.de/ - ARS ELECTRONICA, Linz, 2000
» http://www.aec.at/de…t.asp?iProjectID=2245
Secondary Literature
- Fleischmann, Monika; Bohn, Christian-A.; Strauss, Wolfgang, Interactive Strategies in Virtual Architecture and Art, in: Intelligent Environments; Peter Droege (ed.); Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam 1997
References
- Paul Sermon: "“Desert Rain” by the UK based media art performance group Blast Theory included similar water projection techniques."