Sergio Prego, “Black Monday”(to view video: look up artists, Sergio Prego, video of selected work)

Black Monday

The Yerba Buena Gallery in San Francisco had a digital arts exhibition that ran until November 11, 2007 called “Dark Matters, Artists see the Impossible”. Various digital artists displayed their works in visuals, sounds and installations. There were many interesting works in the exhibit, but one I found intriguing was ‘Black Monday’ by Sergio Prego.

I walked around to the back of the gallery to encounter this partly enclosed video installation and was riveted in place by the sounds and visuals. There is a large screen video that flashes jolting images of an explosion fused with an electronic music. The images create a dizzying, vertigo effect. The ‘glitch’ soundtrack is disjointed and repetitive.

Prego staged explosions with flares in a large open warehouse. He used a ring of synchronized cameras to capture stages of the blast and the plume of smoke at fixed moments in time. Over 1000 photos were taken, scanned, then digitally composited into a film that rotates 360 degrees around the explosion. The 3 minute film uses a stop-motion technique, where the camera moves but the subject doesn’t (like in “The Matrix”). There is a zoom in and zoom out that occurs through each rotation of the film, probably due to blocking structures in the studio, but this amplifies the visual effect.

Prego creates a ‘hyperreal’ environment where authentic representation is altered and amplified. It could also be seen as a type of synthetic realism. His digitally manipulated images merge with the electronic sounds and create a surreal environment that would be visually impossible otherwise. Prego obviously wants truth and simplicity in his work because he kept his methodology obvious, and you can see the cameras on tripods surrounding the explosion.

Prego challenges the conventional notion time, space and navigation by manipulating different perspectives of a single moment in time. It forces us to look at how we comprehend relationships within visual images. He also explores our tendency to simplify patterns of events into sequences and manageably consistent images in an otherwise chaotic world.

I was most impressed with how Prego converted a series of still life photos into a 3 dimensional sculptural shape in video. It is a type of digital photogrammetry and a way of reinterpreting images. The explosion becomes an entity that is manipulated into a non-static sculpture. Each vapor of smoke is immobilized in time and space and transformed into a static tangible form, and then evaporates. His work can be seen as a ‘spectacle’ in that it is an event that has moved into the realm of representation.

Prego’s installation also brings to the forefront the topical aspect of explosions and their association with tragic and bloody outcomes, which gives the work a more ominous overtone.

So I’ve moved again…my installation has anyway. It’s still the same image, but I’ve been relocated by the Charles Scott Gallery and facilities to the photo stairwell in the north west corner. There is a painting exhibition going on this Monday, so I was evicted from my obscure space under the concourse stairway. Oh well, I have control over the photo stairwell, which is bright, lofty, freezing cold, and mine for one day. It is a small “white cube”, and a pseudo gallery space unto itself for artists who don’t quite make it into the concourse gallery…yet. It is totally appropriate for my “Attempt to Levitate” intervention. I’ll have to post the final image on Monday.

project02_shannonh.pdf Just finished a CGIA project using a quote on time. The gist of it is that you can’t live creatively in the present if you are freaked or worried about your past or future. So, after working on three projects this week, I’m ready to collapse into the hot tub at the ‘ol family cabin at Mt. Baker. There is no internet access, so I can’t keep up with the blog until Sunday. Oh, too bad!

Here’s my revised intervention. It’s addressing issues like dealing with unreasonable stress and going beyond your creative limits. It’s kind of a parody to Bruce Nauman’s ‘Failure to Levitate in the studio’ but with my own twist of the ‘attempt’ and balancing failure with success, insecurities, and risking alternative outcomes.

This is a hypothetical ley line I created between my house and my grandparents cemetery. Ley lines are alleged paths of energy that align sacred sites. Spirits are believed to travel along these lines. My pilgrimage was to find symbolic references along my ley line and photograph them. I was totally surprised by the sites and objects I encountered.

View map.

Now if I can figure out how to link it to the blog…

View Larger Map

There is a transition area at Lonsdale quay that I find fascinating. The skeletal remains of the old Burrard shipyard are waiting to be torn down, and new high rises are being built behind them. It is very quiet here, like a graveyard, despite the surrounding activity. You can feel a kind of eerie presence of the thousands of people who worked here over a hundred year period. This turned out to be a difficult panorex to make seamless because of all the lines on the bridge and building that had to line up. I feel like I captured a piece of history before the whole area changes.