4833 rph — Explore and Discuss

I liked that the video facades would be silent, which gave me a chance to rant as loudly and as much as I wanted on any subject without danger of having to justify myself. Or further, to try to make myself heard through the silence, like talking extra loud to someone who doesn’t speak your language in hopes they will understand. I’ve done a number of pieces (primarily live performances) which depend upon difficult to impossible systems of communication: trying to address the audience in Klingon, using signaling whistles, magnetic letters, hand written notes, walkie-talkies, and creating word games or questionnaires to filter language. One thing that interested me about this project is all of the different things which are potentially read into silence. If you listen politely to a talkative stranger at a bus stop they may take your occasional nodding for acceptance, disdain, passivity, stupidness, or bestow upon you the qualities of someone else they know. Although despite the silence of my videos, I guess I am really the talkative stranger, blurting out theories and views to whoever is in the area. But I think the silence still functions as a depository for the audiences ideas about what I may be saying as much as for my own words.

Every artwork is attempting to say “Hey look at me I’m brilliant” anyway, so I decided to start there. And then my videos are also in competition with each other. On each screen I appear, I am trying to distract the viewer from the other four next to me.

Maybe this is everyday stuff for artists who normally work large, but I was really surprised by how much the videos change from different vantage points. When making them, I was primarily imagining the exterior view, with all five screens visible at once and seen as a part of the building and the city around it. (I had a photo of this tacked up in my studio while I was working). But looking at the videos from the catwalk is very different, and I think much more tactile. The scale becomes more evident, because you cannot really look at all of the screens at one time. The figures in the video become gauged more in relation to the size of one’s own body. For example, John Bannon’s parade viewers often seem life-sized, and my own face is gigantic, aggressive, and much more authoritarian. From this view I also experienced the desire to run from video to video to see what I was missing on the other screens. People were making shadow puppets in the projection beam, and children were picking the nose of my ranting video projection.

-Deva Eveland