graduate work
between the memory and the map
This is a revision of my MFA Thesis project in the Photographic & Electronic Media department at Maryland Institute College of Art, 2011 - the structure remains the same, but I gave it a new title and shot new photographic content in the year following my graduation.
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The layout is six Kodak slide projectors that have been stripped down and reconfigured to house five images each, stacked along the projected beam, and visible individually by intercepting the projection at certain intervals with the reflective boards provided. Each projector was assigned to one of six parallel streets in Baltimore City that comprise the main corridor running from the harbor north to Charles Village, and features imagery taken along that stretch - faint incomplete line drawings derived from photographs - and placed in their real order. So in effect this creates a kind of spacial cartographic model of this part of the city, with each scene existing simultaneously yet only visible in pieces as you walk through it and interact with it.
The original installation, MICA MFA Thesis Exhibitions 2011, under its former title "Cinemalism" and with different content. Reflective boards can be seen on brackets below each projection, for use by gallery patrons.
A close up view of the reconfigured projector, now a static device, with the slides partially visible. To get to this point I cut away most of the casing, removed the electronics and mechanics, adjusted some of the internal metal housings, replaced the light source with a cool burning 50-watt LED, and extended the lens. I cut the slide frames from aluminum, and the slides themselves were made with standard transparencies. The whole unit is supported by a microphone stand and attachments made from PVC and ABS. Five seemed to be the maximum number of images I could pack into this space without them bleeding too much into one another.
Howard, Maryland, Charles, St. Paul, Calvert and Guilford - these are the streets corresponding to the projectors, chosen mostly for their significance and familiarity. The new installation has each projector lined up parallel accordingly, and with the southernmost scenes appearing closest to each projector and the northernmost images the ones that appear on the gallery wall.
Selections from the projector dedicated to St. Paul Street and the one dedicated to Maryland Avenue.
Capturing the actual interaction is complicated because of changing focal points and light concentration, so here I've simply adjusted the focus in and out to represent the same effect you'd get by moving the reflective board back and forth - that interactive setup lets you experience the imagery in three dimensional space along a series of planes, as illustrated below.
This is a good visualization, to add to the sample videos, of the five images in their actual spacial coexistence as inferred by the interactive experience. Here you get the sense of disruption - in the form of blocking the projection - transformed into something revelatory. And it's important for a few reasons that this installation consists of static devices that are also anatomized. It's apparent that there's no trickery, you're simply interacting with a beam of light. This draws attention back to (and into) the projector, emphasizing a whole where we otherwise perceive separate parts, and more abstractly redirects an interest probably most often piqued by technological advancement (which this is not) to questions about visual memory and information retrieval. With the recent digitization of seemingly everything, I also thought it a timely exploration just as I did with my early film studies - I wanted to find out exactly what is the nature of a medium before we're so accustomed to more sophisticated variants that such endeavors might not even occur to us.
projections on ash
This would be the genesis of the above project. Years earlier in college I had found a mid-century slide projector out in front of a house in rural Vermont with a "free" sign on it and one slide inside featuring an old black and white shot of a construction site. These models often used a higher wattage bulb, making them suitable for this application: throwing a handful of fine ash across the focal point and photographing that rendered image with the night sky as the backdrop. It was mesmerizing to watch this happen in real time, almost as much as it was with magic lanterns of the 17th century (regarded at the time as utterly mystical) which on occasion used smoke as a canvas for a stunning ghostly effect. Between a desire to find some less explored territory and my efforts to customize the projector itself, I began developing what would become my MFA Thesis.
The medvedev trials
This is an idea I was playing around with in 2009, inspired by the old Baltimore tradition of painting window and door screens with colorful scenery - visibility from outside-in is diminished, while from inside-out it's unaffected. I upgraded the materials and used then Russian President Dimitri Medvedev (for no particular reason) as an example of a lit image leaving different imagery in its shadow. The same property also allowed for the application of colored filters, as shown here. It's an idea I still think has artistic potential (perhaps a screen painting retrospective?) and can be expanded in ways I hadn't attempted by the time I settled on a thesis project.
A traditional painted window screen in Baltimore City.
(Photo by Kevin Mueller)
A preliminary test, with a portrait of Tom Waits that's invisible at the primary level of a simple painted screen. The screen weave is visible in the shadow imagery, but this detail diminished with the revised materials.