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Scott Snibbe's Deep Walls A Close Reading
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Deep Walls (2003), by Scott Snibbe, consists of a camera
and a rectangular screen which is divided in 16 smaller
rectangular screens. The camera records the projected shadow
of the viewers who move in front of the screen, and each of
the small screens plays one of those recordings over and
over until a new recording replaces the oldest recording.
The piece is set up in a way that the viewer is not aware
that she is recorded; she only realizes that her oversized
shadow is projected onto the big rectangle, not knowing that
when she leaves her action materializes as a looping
silhouette in one of the small screens. Given the
inexplicitness of the grammar of interaction, in many cases
what is recorded is the attempt to figure out the grammar of
interaction. This can be considered a metacommentary on
interactivity. However, there is much more symbolic in this
installation.
Deep Walls has a vital cinematic aspect and actually is
“particularly inspired by the surrealist films of Jan
Svankmajer” (Snibbe 2003). It creates, as Snibbe notes,
“a projected cabinet of cinematic memories”
(Ibid). However, not on the aesthetic level but on the level
of interaction, one may also consider Deep Walls to
be a bulletin board where people communicate with each
other. This especially comes into mind when the piece is
exhibited outside the gallery context, in an environment
frequented by the same people again and
again.[1]
Here people can leave visual messages – a funny or
irritating shadow play – for their friends and
colleagues who would search the screen for a familiar
silhouette and respond with their own little movie. But even
though users do not have specific addressees in mind, the
movies generated suggest that users do understand this
interactive installation as an arena where they can stage
filmic messages for the next users. Thus, one finds movies
where people (or, rather, their silhouettes)[2]
obviously talk to the audience, or where two people get
involved in an argument and finally turn violent. Deep
Walls not only requires its audience to act – in
front of other people or unobserved[3]
– it also inspires them to act in terms of both past
and future: The silhouette recordings already playing
inspire the current viewers, who may then create their own.
However, those new viewers do not only embody inspiration
from and appreciation for the existing movies, but also
their potential deletion. The moment of recording clearly
exists in relation to past and future. Its future is to
become past.
In a certain way, a recording is always about the past. With
respect to photography, Roland Barthes states that every
image represents a here and now, which has become a
there and then
(Barthes 2003: 120; Barthes 1984: section 33). Once,
the photographed really was in front of the camera; the
photograph is a proof of its existence in that historic
moment.[4]
However, it is also a testimony to the moment’s past.
The possibility or certainty that the photographed does not
exist anymore at the moment the photographed is perceived
causes the melancholia of photography (Barthes
1984: section 33). According to Barthes and phrased
with McLuhan, the message of the medium photography is
“the return of the dead”.[5] Barthes
also notes that, historically, photography began as an art
of people: their identity, their social status, their body
per se. (Barthes
1984: section 33) According to mythology, this is
also true for painting, whose origin goes back to a maid of
ancient Corinth, Dibutade, who traced the shadow of her
lover onto a wall in order to remember him during his
absence. In that sense, painting actually started as
photography because the presented really had been there and
his image was a truthful copy of the original, which is what
the shadow Dibutade traced and the shadows in Deep
Walls have in common. Apart from that, they relate to
each other like Romanticism and Postmodernism, because the
old setting comes to a simple, happy end (one maid, one
lover, one room, and one shadow, which lasts forever), while
Deep Walls reveals how remembering turns into
forgetting: every new silhouette recorded makes one old
silhouette disappear.
Thus, Barthes’s notion about photography and death
becomes an even stronger idea in Deep Walls. New
visitors provide the shadows with an audience, which may be
inspired by those shadows – observation confirms that
many interactors mimic the actions they were watching on the
screens as they perform for the camera. But this
audience—inspired, witnessing—is also a competitor
for public visibility and eventually replaces previous
shadows. This seems to be the major facet of the grammar of
interaction: the interactor has a chance to have a moment
recorded, but only to see it vanish. One may read Deep
Walls as a work about time passing by, about death and
about the decay of our traces. The actions of the former
generations – represented in movies of silhouettes
– are inspiring to the next and may survive in their
actions, though the record of it may finally get lost. That
this loss happens as a joyful, pleasurable play makes the
piece even more melancholic, or rather suggests seeing the
inevitable decay with the necessary distance and, at the
same time, urges to seize the moment.
This moment is about a kind of courage. As mentioned above,
being recorded in front of the screen while watched by other
people requires overcoming one’s self-consciousness.
Interactive art of such kind as Deep Walls and
Text Rain by Camille Utterback requires the
participants to make the decision not to be shy, but to step
into the center of attention. On the surface level, this can
be read as making a spectacle of one’s self. On the
symbolic level, this can – as in the case of Deep
Walls – be read as the choice to get involved or
stay behind, to engage and commit or just observe, i.e. two
ways of connecting to time and society.
The grammar of interaction in Deep Walls has other
interesting aspects. As long as a participant interacts with
the piece, her silhouette is bigger than all the other
shadows, and overshadows some of them; when she leaves the
screen, her shadow is integrated to it, in its smaller,
recorded version. The participant now can watch her own
silhouette from behind, together with other people who may
not recognize the silhouette’s identity. Thus, one is
arranged within a broader context and distanced from who one
has been just a moment before. This is reminiscent of the
short life of most appearances of a person or topic in
contemporary media.[6]
Moreover the contextualization easily translates to the
symbolic level of archiving and filing historical actions.
Snibbe states about Deep Walls: The
name of the piece is a design pattern from architect
Christopher Alexander’s ‘Pattern Language’.
His admonition to architects is to build the walls of homes
thick, so that cabinets, drawers and windows can perforate
the interior space, providing areas to store, display, slice
through and ultimately provide more meaning within the home.
In the spirit of Alexander, this work gradually absorbs the
contents of its environment onto its surface.
(Ibid.) Snibbe
continues: “By collecting the viewers’ own
shadows, the piece reveals how individual objects gain in
symbolic meaning, while losing literal meaning, through
organization, repetition and display.” (Ibid.) The idea
of a wall as an archive of its historical environment is
surely close to anyone who, in front of an old building, has
wondered what it (or one stone in particular, to make it
more dramatic) has witnessed and would tell us if it could.
Sometimes walls do tell by means of signs history has left
on them: color, letters, plants, bullet holes,
graffiti...
Taking into account the grammar of interaction in Deep
Walls, one can certainly say that the wall/screen echoes
the content of its environment and it does so longer than a
mirror would do. Nonetheless, all in all the symbolic
meaning in Deep Walls is not absorption but erasure.
Strictly speaking, the symbolic meaning is absorption
in addressing its erasure: By being about recording and
erasure, the piece triggers reflections about absorption and
preservation. However, this reflection may have its source
in the participants’ bodies to the extent that they do
or do not absorb the shadow play of their predecessors and
preserve it for their successors in their own shadow play.
The metaphorical meaning of the shadow or silhouette becomes
that of a trace, which survives, for a while at least, even
after the shadow’s owner and the shadow are
gone.
Quite different is the way Edward Tannenbaum is using a
similar technique to project the interactor’s
silhouette onto the wall. His installation Recollections
IV invites the participant to move in front of a large
video projection screen: “As the person moves, his or
her image is recorded by a video camera and passed on to a
computer with special image processing capabilities. The
person's silhouette or outline is extracted, assigned a
color based on the instant that it was recorded, and
projected onto the screen. Over time the images build up,
creating a painting based on the movement. Simultaneously
the colors are ‘rotated’, creating an animation in
‘real time’”.[7]
Tannenbaum notes that even the most inhibited people
seem to rise to the occasion and create beautiful images. He
adds: The piece is “an unforgettable experience for
many, with educational benefits in the areas of color, form,
movement, and computer graphics.” In contrast to
Deep Walls this work facilitates the
participant’s action by a sophisticated computer
program that, with time delay and coloration, creates
fascinating effects even out of very normal, unobtrusive
motions. Thus, the burden of coming up with something
exciting is taken from the interactor. The focus of
perception is the real-time action rather than any symbolic
implications. Beauty, so to speak, trumps
meaning. [1] This was the case with the exhibition of
Deep Walls I curated in the lobby of [2] Although the artist himself speaks of
shadows, one may more accurately call it silhouettes since a
shadow cannot exist without the presence of its owner. (The
reverse it true in Adelbert von Chamisso’s novella
Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1813) whose
main character sells his shadow to the devil and hence, as a
person without shadow, loses his social reputation.)
[3] The exhibition’s location influences
fundamentally the way people interact with the piece. In
contrast to a busy lobby, a quiet gallery space where the
interactor can generate a movie without being watched by
others helps to overcome self-consciousness when interacting
with the piece.
[4] For Barthes therefore “the
relationship of signifieds to signifiers is not one of
‘transformation’ but of
‘recording’”; the true relation between
signifier and signified or their identity respectively is
the literal message of a photograph (the “message
without a code”) (Barthes 2003: 120 and 119). [5] “[T]he return of the
dead” is “that rather terrible thing which is
there in every photograph” (Barthes 1984: section 4). [6]
And of course, the fact that
everybody can walk up to the screen to be displayed evokes
Andy Warhol’s famous notion about the 15 minutes of
fame. [7]
www.et-arts.com References Barthes, Roland (2003):
Rhetoric of the Image, in: Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography
Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 114-125. Snibbe, Scott (2003): Deep
Walls
-www.snibbe.com/scott/mosaics/deep%20walls/deep_walls.html |
