Computer-aided video installation
Film with real-time video insets, light, wall and screen constructions
2’12’’ loop

The Apropos of Seeing installation uses a computer to merge into a single projection previously shot footage with real-time video of the viewer’s position (gallery space). This integrates the viewer visually into the cinematic narrative of the piece. The viewer sees him/herself literally inside the film, an actor in a movie.

The conventional film presents an illusion. The material world it shows is absent. The aim of Apropos of Seeing is to break this cinematic reality of the ‘black cube’, which restricts the viewer’s role to that of an outsider and a passive observer. In viewing the piece, what does the viewer actually watch: a film, him/herself, his/her own gaze…? Where is the viewer: in a gallery or a museum, a Roman palace, in the virtual space of a film…? The installation makes visible the viewer’s reality of the ‘here and now’ in relation to the reality happening in ‘another place and time’, the one traditionally depicted in pictures and films.

The installation
The viewer experiences the work through a door frame constructed in the gallery. The frame is the same size and shape as the doors in the Roman palace where the footage was shot. Real-time video cameras are installed in the gallery in precise positions so that when the viewer looks at him/herself in the film, his/her eyes seem to be focused on the actor (the artist) standing on the other side of the door. The lighting, materials and angles of the real-time cameras are chosen to create the illusion that the corridor of the Roman palace and the gallery are a single continuous space.