PAN & ZOOM
(2015) Kaya Barry & Jondi Keane
Interactive performative installation of expanded image-making and viewing.
"Pan" by Kaya Barry & "Zoom" by Jondi Keane. Curated by Mick Douglas. Performing Mobilities Exhibition, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne. Sep 24-Oct 26. Part of the Peformance Studies International (PSi) event.
PAN & ZOOM take the effects inscribed in the global language of cinema and turn them into performative and participatory image-making apparatuses. Jondi Keane and Kaya Barry's installation invites visitors to collaborate in the construction of the images in order to re-explore relations between media technologies and embodied experience. The result is an expanded, amplified and dilated experience of the performative power of image-making and image-viewing.
View an interactive excerpt of PAN here (opens in a new window).
Above: Screenshot of "Pan"
PAN: "panoramic environments", created by Kaya Barry, activates an accumulating collection of moving panoramic images – provided by participants from around the world – that visitors may interactively inhabit. The visitor manipulates relationships between a projector mounted upon a dolly track, and a trackpad that scrolls the projected panorama.
The live event of constructing-perceiving panoramic tracking shots opens up in ways that expand sensory experience beyond usual peripheries. The images are from a collection of sites in Australia, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Japan, and the Bahamas.
Above: Installation view of "Pan"
Above: Installation view of "Zoom"
Over 380 photographs were collected for PAN, and over 100 videos were produced for ZOOM in the gallery.
ZOOM co-opts the 'dolly-zoom' effect in cinema – wherein the camera zooms in while moving backward or zooms out while moving forward – resulting in the image expanding to amplify an intense moment of realisation. Hitchcock developed this technique in Vertigo to show audiences how the protagonist experiences his fear of heights. Jondi Keane pulls apart the double movement of the camera effect by himself performing the pulling back and forth of a moving wall as a backdrop. Moments of realisation are created between visitors who take up the camera operation, and an improvising actor's role, to accompany Keane's durational wall moving. An updating collection of short videos were made over the exhibition period shown on one of the installation screens.
Click here to see a selection of videos created in "Zoom" (opens new page)
The relation of the two works - PAN & ZOOM - addresses the way movement relates to the notion of mobility and investigates the way spatial experiences is constructed by individuals as indicative of their qualitative relationship. While each part of the work explores different aspects of spatial experience, they both concern themselves with the difference within and across these experiences and the collective constructions involved.
See the Performing Mobilities website for further details (opens in new window).
Drawing with PAN
(2015) An exploration of moving-with-panoramic imagery
During the exhibition I decided to explore different ways the panoramic images could be performed - as projections, as traces of bodily movements, or as artworks and artefacts themselves.
Experimenting with long-exposure photographs, moving the dolly track and projector along the wall and the photographic image would capture the projected image in different ways. The result is an expansion of the panoramic image along the wall - the long exposure of the photograph captured the light of the projection and traced its movement along the wall. The person moving and the dolly track are not rendered visible in the photograph.
It is a point at which the physical and digital movements of PAN are working together - the digital images are stabilised in the long-exposure, while the content appears to stretch out along the wall as a static collation of panoramas. The photographs expands the image, tracing the movement along the wall. The panoramic becomes a stillness within the movements.
In the last few days of the exhibition, we pinned paper along the wall and drew the panoramic images as they moved. One person would move the dolly while the other drew.
