Weighting

Weighting is a kinetic video installation which attempts to realise what initially seems to be an impossibility; how the movement of performers contained within a digital video can have a direct physical impact on their surrounding environment.
The piece works on three levels, literal, empathetic and analogous.
The literal is a technical trick: the physical work as witnessed by the viewer. This takes the form of a number of performers depicted in video on two large LCD monitors connected together by a 3 meter horizontal piece of trussing. The monitors show these performers standing and waiting in a Beckett like fashion; why they are waiting is never disclosed. The five performers are distributed between both screens. Every so often one performer leaves the frame of the first screen to enter the second and visa versa. The whole piece is carefully balanced on a central axle that allows the beam (and hence the monitors) to rise and fall. Concealed motors within the mechanism are synchronised to the performers movements so as to tilt the beam as they move from one monitor to the other, responding as if their bodies were physically present in the space: effectively reproducing a large set of weighing scales.
The empathetic follows on from research conducted in Gravity Shift (Sandiland 2010) which explores how witnessing the moving body can directly affect the viewer’s own body awareness through kinaesthetic empathy, particularly if the motion of the witnessed body is affected by another invisible force (such as gravity).
On an analogous level, the piece suggests how the intangible and representational have direct repercussions in the physical world. In an ironic manner Weighting also reflects on the more banal side of our digital interactions within a consumerist culture by presenting an endless cycle of interaction with no particular aim or progression embracing themes such as futility, pointlessness and the pursuit of the new.
Weighting is funded through Arts Council England