Andrea Zapp has a background in film and TV studies and creates disorientating digital installation stages mixing real, virtual and online spaces, combined with surveillance interfaces and technology.
Human Avatars is an interactive installation that creates a visual and imaginary dialogue between real and virtual participants on a networked stage:
Visitors in the exhibition space discover a wooden hut, which they are invited to enter. The participants sit down at a table, surrounded by the personal objects and props of an inhabited space, like letters, books, teacups etc.
A live video of the visitor is shot by a hidden camera inside above the door and sent to a remote model version of the hut. Based on a black box video capturing system inside the big hut and using an optical trick in the small hut the now small-sized participants are projected in exact proportion to the miniature room sitting on the model furniture. Other visitors can make contact with the tiny moving figures by peeping through a small window. Yet unaware that a small surveillance camera in the model captures their faces through the window and sends them back via a data-projector onto the window of the big shed, with their huge eyes and features suddenly overshadowing the participants inside; the grainy surveillance image making them look partly real and partly like a bizarre observer from an unknown space. The shift in scale and sizes refers to the network as a representational stage - being big and small, hence outside and inside the medium.
However, it could also turn out to be controversial and ironic, once the voyeuristic strategy behind the idyllic backdrop becomes evident - and the participants feeling more and more observed and exposed. The project then recalls rather ambivalent and melancholic side effects of surveillance, self-exposure and visual control, which we have come to accept as an intrinsic part of our life, and as an entertaining part of mass media. |
