Cut Stories
Panoramic 8-channel digital video installation, 23:20 minutes
Cut Stories is an installation in which 8 monitors of varying sizes serve as one semi-circular, layered screen, displaying any of six short, true personal narratives covering a range of subjects, from an intimate night conversation in Brazil ending with a man running through the fog holding a severed cow leg, to an American sex scene involving fractured bones and religion, to other tales of surgeries, injuries and car accidents: all transgressions into the participants invisible personal spaces.
The visitor to the installation enters a darkened space in which a panorama of faces is spread over the arc of monitors. It is a constantly panning image shot from the center of a circle of seated participants: most are listening to the story being told by one of them.
Beyond these, in the shadows is another circle of people holding cameras of every type, rotating around the inner circle in a dance of mediation.
The seemingly continuous image of seated people is actually comprised of adjacent windows into consecutive points of time within the single, constantly panning video: these are tiled next to each other so as to create the illusion of continuous space. The effect of this is that only the central monitor is showing the current, audio-synchronized, real-time. The other monitors are showing adjacent participants at moments that are increasingly further away from the present, towards either the future (left) or the past (right).
Full credits are available here.
Installation setup: 4X4 m room, 8 tiled flat screens of varying dimensions, from 7” to 42”; surround sound system, customized counters, carpet, 4 folding wooden chairs.
