Video/sound installation with live performance
by Ingrid Plum 2005
all music and visuals © Ingrid Plum 2005
Stills images from "Dead Space" video.
"Dead Space" is a video/sound installation combined with live performance on the opening night.
The video uses splitscreen video projection over 2 walls with surround sound.
The splitscreen video features a dancer performing in a house that had been empty for 30 years. The movement and sound evoke the fractured timeline of the space. Echoes of actions and melodies are repeated in a search for resolution within the duplicity of memory. A dialogue evolves from this; the clarity of a memory that seems to last forever, versus the vague shadows of past possibilities.
The mind struggles through half-remembered ambient sensations to piece together a linear truth. Inevitably this proves impossible; the past is as fluid and transitory as the future, and the clear memory is drawn out so far it becomes static, dissolving into the strength of the sentiment it evokes, the action irrelevant. The shadowy possibilities are repeated until they diverge into parallel paths, both possible and either one accurate. The mind has to acknowledge ignorance of what it has witnessed.
For the installation and performance of "Dead Space" as part of the '2' exhibition at the Fringe Gallery, Brighton, I built a wall from tracing paper and PVA glue to emulate the windows used in the video.
At the private view myself and Nicola Keith, the dancer I directed in the video, performed for the 8 minute duration of the video. The performance began with us both standing back to back, silhouetted behind the tracing paper wall inside the space.
I began singing and drawing on the dirty floor in chalk, whilst Nicola danced and drew on the wall in charcoal. We repeated the pattern drawn on the dirty window in the video. I sang the refrain from the soundtrack, preempting the recording so that it sounded like an echo of what I was doing live. Our movements were a similarly extended and excruciatingly slow progress as we gradually covered the floor and wall in the repeating pattern. We finished side by side, having explored the whole territory of the space vertically and horizontally. The audience watched from the outside of the tracing paper wall.
The markings on the floor and wall remained as part of the completed installation for the rest of the exhibition, and viewers could go in and out of the space to view the installation as they wished.
Photographs of Dead Space installation at '2' for RAG, Fringe Gallery, Brighton.
