Echo Loci is an installation exploring the interactions between the memory and perception. The concept stems from my experiences returning to once familiar places to find both the space and myself changed. Where once the environment and I were familiar, we are now strangers. Memories color the perception of the new reality of the place, and I see myself as I once was, and more clearly understand where I come from and who I am now. The installation compresses the timeline of that interaction between physical and remembered presence. The viewers recognize themselves from their shadows and distorted images, and hear their voice and footfalls replayed.
The piece uses two cameras, handmade translucent projection screens, abstract animations, distorted ambient sound, and delayed video feedback to create imprints of viewers and their shadows as they move through a world of false depth, memory, and visual and auditory echoes.
The stage is set by two delayed-video feedback systems arranged as an offset mirror image of each other. Each system contains a hand-sewn paper and nylon screen, a projector, a camera, and a laptop with Isadora running a 90 second delay between the camera and the projector.
As the viewer moves around the screen, their image, gestures, voice, and footsteps are captured by the camera and microphone on the other side of the screen and replayed temporally and spatially transformed, creating a shadow of them against their physical presence. This effect differs from the “hall of mirrors” of unaltered video feedback in that it does not repeat infinitely. The cycle is continuously broken by the delay and the offset nature of the feedback loop. The effect instead is one of a parallel dimension: a world within the screen inhabited by shadows of one’s former self. Interactive video installations encourage play and engagement with the viewers shadow/half-remembered and that of their companions, and the documentation shows people experiencing themselves as they’ve already forgotten they had just been.