Troy Innocent, Memetic
Mutation, multi-
media
installation with sound
by Ollie Olsen,
programming by Troy
Innocent & Steve
Taylor, 1997

These examples represent not only the historical and the new, but the transformations that have taken place in projection technologies and visual experience during the last decade. In fact, Screen is best conceived as a parable of the changes that have taken place within video and slide-projection installation, and the gradual inclusion of the spectator from a pedestrian observer to an integral part of the installation.

This is not to say that interactive installation spaces have completely superseded the comparatively passive act of watching the projected image. On the contrary, a work such as Innocent's Memetic Mutations can be clearly seen as an extension of the grammar of projection, since it appropriates so many of its typical features. As curators Jenepher Duncan and Natalie King suggest that the overall organization of the exhibition offers a variety of viewing experiences, such that the gallery space functions as a kind of map of the shifting nature of visual experience in projection-based installation.

The idea of the static image as a trapped moment is cannily enacted in Ian de Gruchy's Vice-suspending disbelief (1997), which features a projected image of a seriously tactile vice, glimpsed through the bars of a booth which seem to hold it in place, as if it were an aberration in an oddities exhibition. The gradual and subtle iterations of the captured, projected image are dispersed throughout the gallery space, providing a dynamic survey-exploration of the evolution of the screen as a space that temporarily receives traces.

Cleverly avoiding a didactic, linear chronology, the exhibition can be entered from a number of vantage points, which takes the spectator into different moments, or stages of the projected image's evolution: one door leads to Leone and Macdonald's Passing (1996), a video grid exploring social disjunctures between appearance and reality; another leads you to Troy Innocent's Memetic Mutations (1997); yet another into a larger space comprising dynamic movement, Brook Andrew and Raymond Peer's Fragmented Corporeality (1996), Susan Norrie's Temptation (1995), and serial transition, Sue Ford and Ben Ford's Faces 1976-1996.

Maniacs of Disappearance: Today's Japan as Disseminator of Video Messages is not as as compelling as Screen. It seemed a little tucked out of the way, and lacked the overall thematic coherence of the other. Nonetheless, it was a rich compilation of video art produced in Japan in recent years and like Screen, many of its contributions demonstrated the shifting morphology of video art, as it increasingly embraces cybernetic and digital technologies.

Two good examples of these innovations are Taro Chiezo's An Experiment: Robots to Fall in Love/or not (1994), which features subsumption architecture robots who play out a narrative of artificial life, desire and death, and David Blair's work in progress Jews in Space, a complex, multi-nodal work that will eventually be available in video form, on the Internet as a MOO and as a 3D space modelled in Virtual Reality Markup Language.

This exhibition presents a timely essay on the screen as a field of representation, a dynamic portrait of its emergent hybridity as it incorporates the virtual into its historical vocabulary.

Darren Tofts
1997

Ian de Gruchy, Vice -
suspended disbelief,
slide projection and
constructed box,
240cm x 320cm x
320cm, 1997.

Teiji Furuhashi,
Lovers, 1995

© The artists and
Courtesy of Monash
University Gallery