Simulacrum
Working with projectors to display my Animations series led me to experiment with their potential, particularly in regard to simulation or illusion. This brief project, animating an ordinary kitchen blender, led to much more extensive use of projection-mapping in the years to follow.
The concept was a critique of how spectacle can grab our attention, even if all it is doing is imitating banal aspects of life that we would not otherwise stop and consider. The primary object was an unfired clay duplicate of a kitchen blender, accurate in scale and basic form, but not highly detailed, and with no surface decoration. That was surrounded by a framework holding up a set of mirrors. The mirrors made it possible to see all sides (except the bottom) from the same point. I placed an actual blender on the pedestal, and video-recorded it turning on with some water in it, and turning off. Then I replaced the blender with the clay copy, and replaced the video camera with a video projector. Essentially I had pulled in the light in the first step, and was pushing it back out to the same places in the second step. The result is not very well documented unfortunately, as I was inexperienced with such things, and HD video was not easily available at the time. The experience of viewing the form with the video playing struck me as a kind of cognitive dissociation, where one part of my brain was telling me that I was looking at an opaque, solid chunk of clay, and other parts of my brain were signalling that I was looking at a transparent vessel with moving water and hearing spinning blades.
