In the Flesh exhibition

Michelle Gay · Artist Statement

stretchpoem

Building and using computers to make and operate interactive screen/projection based art is a major part of my art practice. Since the mid 1990's I have been engaging code to drive animation, interactivity, and audio elements within computer works themselves - taking the machine out of the dominion of the common workstation and into the realm of the poetic. The interactive media series Experiments with a Reader (looploop, stretchpoem, futurenatural) (2002-06) all explore ideas of text in relation to landscape.

stretchpoem, a gallery sized room projection, presents lines of code infused into a multi-line story. The story appears and moves according to the viewers touch and pressure on a Multi-touch controller developed originally for the Canadian Space Agency. Situated in two simultaneous locations - the landscape of projected text as well as the physical location in the gallery where the touch controller is located, the viewer is invited to tease the story out of the projection, one line at a time, from a distant horizon visually situated in deep virtual space. The more gentle pressure one exerts, the faster the lines come toward the viewer and the larger they become - and in a curious perceptual effect - seem to fly through and past you as they leave the frame. When the fingers are lifted off the touchpad, the lines of the story slingshot back one at a time, first quickly, and then, nearing their vanishing point, slowing down.

stretchpoem challenges the typical process of reading, as text passages move with your body, words hide or reveal subsequent lines in layers. The protagonists in this story - embodied numbers, merge with the lines of code in an interactive fiction. This work moves past the hypertext world - integrating a virtual space with a textual space that is set in time.

I describe my work as gamey, digital dreams and expanded cinema - functioning as toys and tools, and collapsing these two forms. The observer/viewer activates these works - proprioceptively and poetically merging with virtual spaces, virtual sounds, fictional characters and drawings - beginning with the tips of their own fingers on the touch and pressure sensitive input pads or other human-computer interfaces. There are indices to the 'real' within my works, but reveal themselves as "logically incompatible situations" (as François Lyotard describes fantasy). They are "impossible places that we have the pleasure of inhabiting virtually". I'm intrigued by this 'space', so I continue with the challenge of creating virtual, digital works that are experiential, poetic, and social.