Looped video installation with surround sound (7:08) at the London College of Communication, 24 May - 31 May 2017.
Video to be watched fullscreen on computer using headphones.
eyelids_open is a multi-channel video installation focusing on notions of control in the machine age. It elaborates on theories of free will and speaks of the chance for human beings to be living in a simulated environment, run by their advanced descendants to document ancestor’s activities. Three screens metaphorically represent the present, the past and the future as intended by Henri Bergson with the notion of duration[1]. Alongside, surround sound treats viewers as puppets by over-directing their gazes and telling them what to look at in advance but also giving them a chance to veto in those cases when they disregard auditory instructions. The narrative space further consists of moving image, environmental recordings and a metafictional[2] dialogue between two computer voices which addresses limitations implied by a simulated realm. By including filmed projections of 35mm slides belonging to my father’s archive, eyelids_open also focuses on the kind of inheritance that is peculiar to a father-son relationship and the ways in which this conditions free will. The resulting piece makes participants reflect upon their relationship with the genetic legacy left by the parents as well as control and the apparatus in the apparently-free society we live in.
[1] As described in Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907), the durée ‘is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.’ (1998, p. 4) The past never ceases to grow and preserves itself with different levels of concealment to the conscious mind so that ‘we trail behind us, unawares, the whole of our past; but our memory pours into the present only the odd recollection or two that in some way complete our present situation.’ (Bergson, 1988, pp. 5, 167).
[2] According to the Collins English Dictionary (metafiction, 2017): a ‘fiction that acknowledges that it is fictional or artificial’ somewhat describing its own workings and exhibiting them as part of the narrative.