SHELLEY SIMPSON
Subduction
4 May - 30 May 1997
A joint project with the Moving Image Centre
Digital technology is revolutionising the way movies are made. Not only is it invigorating existing forms like the feature film and the music clip, it is also making new kinds of moving image work possible. Shelley Simpson works in one of these new areas, mixing video recordings and live feeds in real time to create moving image accompaniments for performances by the techno band UniTone HiFi.
Her first gallery project, Subduction, extends this work into an interactive gallery context. Simpson took her title from geomorphology: "subduction" being the word for the movement of the earth's tectonic plates over and under one another. In a darkened room a video wash of abstract monochrome mirror patterns is accompanied by an ambient bass drone. The mirror patterns, reminiscent of the old title sequence from Doctor Who, suggest by turns a watery vortex, waves of heat, a play of shadows on the wall, animated Rorscharch blots, cross-sections of body or brain. The droning soundtrack is similarly ambiguous: reassuring and ominous: sublime, familiar. The viewer can interact, triggering two-second audio/visual samples into the mix using a keyboard. These samples by contrast are coded, as "natural" and "mechanical", but they also formally cross-reference: the opening of a bud resembles the opening of the circular door of a space station; a spinning reel of magnetic tape echoes a spinning seed.
Overlaying and interweaving contradictory sounds and visions, Subduction provides an immersive aporia: a site where opposites like "nature" and "technology" lose their oppositional status. Subduction exemplifies techno/rave culture's promotion of the dissolution of distinctions: between self and community, inside and outside, culture and nature.
