Coming into a dark room, the visitor enters a world from which all but one image on the ground has been removed. Enclosed within a construction that is grounded in this image, one is brought into a situation where one experiences "a spatiality without things" which is, as Merleau-Ponty wrote in his 'Phenomenology of Perception' , a spatiality "related to our implantation in the world". Once implanted into Rokeby's installation we become enclosed within an envelope of sounds and images. The images are projected from above onto the 'screen' made of sand which is situated on the floor, but nevertheless fills the entire volume of the room. This image changes due to our presence in the installation. The response of the image is based on infra-red motion detection. The visitor to this installation becomes neither a recipient who is expected to perform nor a spectator who should passively watch, but a person whose body (spotled by a video camera) brings the installation into action: the body triggers the image and the sound and brings them into a state of permanent change. The visitor in this case is just a person whose presence is necessary for the installation to come into being.
In his text 'The Harmonics of interaction' (1992) Rokeby has already stressed his kinesthetic experience in connection with his earlier installation 'Very Nervous System' (1986): "The installation watches and sings, the person listens and dances (...). The music of the 'Very Nervous System' installation is not so much in the sounds that you hear, but in the interplay of resonances that you feel as you experience the work with your body."
As in every video installation where the spacial 'here' and 'now' are combined with the 'elsewhere' and 'elsewhen' of the recorded image based on representation, Rokeby works here with three 'types' of space: the real space of the room which is to be occupied by the 'other' space, the body of the visitor, which is, according to Merleau Ponty "not first of all in space, but it is space". There is also another space, the one in the video image which shows the virtual third dimension. What is represented in the image projected onto sand (silicon) is nature. Turbulent shifts from fire to water call to mind the paintings by Turner; paintings which are here given both the third dimension and sound.
Although there is a tendency in contemporary thinking to read each work which deals with nature in an ecological sense (this installation may therefore be interpreted in this way as well), this aspect does not seem to be primary here. What seems to be more important in Rokeby's installation is the image of nature as an image of eternal change of the organic (carbon) and nonorganic. Rokeby opted here for an idea elaborated in Chinese philosophy of eight elements (and 64 transformations) of nature: water, lake, sky, wind, fire, earth, mountain, thunder. By elaborating the transformations in video, he obtained an image of change. This image is a time-image, but not in the sense Virilio's gives to it (video or film image as a , third window'), taking into account the image which is already made and projected as such. In Rokeby's video installation, the image is constantly made anew. The image of change (in nature) depends on the 'experiental subject' of the installation, the visitor, who 'makes' the change possible.
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Bojana Pejic
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