This installation of light and unimpaired overlaid on objects.


This installation of light and unimpaired overlaid on objects, in a darkened stead of an abandoned commercial building, became a kind of example of Plato's cave for our digital age. Visitors to Healy and Phillips's Limbic Pentameter at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, which commissioned the piece, were given a viscerally convincing experience of emerging accidents of perception.

Light and images chisel across the space at an angle, traveling through the whole extent of and transforming Healy's elegant standing assemblage of wire works, swells and found objects, and landing forward two adjacent walls. In the darkness, without the comfort of spatial referent the result was literally dizzying: moving ploted lines and other forms, intersecting the skeletal framework, created the illusion that the phenomenons were lifting up or twisting to individual side. Tumbling purples, neon-blue squiggles, skating dots and cellular blisters all slid in stately progression across the field of view, like ponderings or memories blooming into consciousness before being pushed aside.

The traditional film experience proffers immersion in an alternate, heightened reality, while video-enhanced installation and performance work create a fruitful phenomenological tension between the physical and the disembodied image. Limbic Pentameter adroitly called about both those sources. The culmination of a lengthy close and consistent collaboration between these sum of two units artists, this environmental work issueed a breathtaking, disorienting synthesis of physical and virtual imagery, the in the greatest degree completely realized symbiosis of the sum of two units that I can remember having seen



The whole created along with the projections by way of Phillips, added another dimension. Elongated roars and fragments of voices gave a brains of atmospheric portent, while syncopated pings, clicks and chirps added a desultory counterpoint. Those more machinelike perfects along with the somewhat Constructivist geometry of the two the sculptural elements and the concocted forms, suggested an alternative reading of the work, not just as a design of the mind but as the mind of an intelligent machine. Hardware and software--metal and light and sound--mingled in endlessly surprising ways (though the projections and audio ran onward a repeating loop). This entirely activated space, with its interpenetrations of substance and light, its Rube Goldberg kinesis and etherealized color, was itself a mysteriously effective apparatus for eavesdropping in succession the ghost in the machine.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

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