I was in residency at Struts in Fall of 2001. I'd just acquired my first automobile. Mostly what I did was just drive around and look at stuff, trying to get inspired. I found a rich natural deposit of free or inexpensive raw materials to feed my art: electric wheelchairs, video surveillance cameras, discarded printers, the working guts of an old 45 jukebox and so on. I spent my time hunting and gathering, and later combining these materials into my existing accumulation. I see this stuff as a sort of sketchbook.

Not only did I find fascinating objects, but places as well. One that stands out is the disused plastic pipe factory near Dorchester. It is a massive steel warehouse plunked down beside the Bay of Fundy in a forest. Loud, eerie, reverberations can be heard inside on a windy day. Back lit bullet holes became weird constellations. Empty sections of the sheet metal walls frame the Bay landscape outside, starkly contrasted by the steel girders and concrete floor, its expanse littered with broken bottles, rusty bedsprings, tin cans and moldy mattresses. I took a lot of video and left with a desire to somehow articulate an experience with this accidental monument to de-industrialization and its strange relationship to its surroundings.

The video is a sequence of systematically controlled permutations. A microcontroller computer controls random access playback of video and the panning motion of the projector apparatus. The video is edited into segments that are consistently a single 360 degree pan in length. They vary in simple criteria: image speed (normal or slow motion), image direction (clockwise or counterclockwise), exposure (long or short), zoom (wide or tight), location (interior of the warehouse or exterior) time (day or night) etc. Physical movement of the projector can be varied independently: projection speed (high or low), projection direction, (R-L or L-R). These qualities can be combined and recombined to a degree that gives the overall appearance of complexity and non-repetition, possibly even suggesting some kind of narrative. Video 1 in the documentation contains samples of a few permutations (night, day, interior, exterior etc. )

There can be interludes where the projector remains motionless. Video 3 illustrates this: POV footage of walking from inside to outside provides a link between the two different locations, and perhaps further enhances the illusion of some kind of narrative.

Perceptual illusions can occur. For example, an odd discrepancy between apparent speed of motion and actual motion, depending on whether the projection moves with or against the direction of the panning motion in the video. In Video 2, as a test, I am manually moving a video projector on a lazy susan. As I moved it back and forth, attempting to stay in synch with the video, I noticed I tended to speed up in one direction, even though the image speed remained constant.

The principal idea with the structure is that it somehow relate to both the the nature of a projected image and the warehouse architecture. Being a circular pan, the ideal projection environment (for zero image distortion or interruption) would be a circular space, with all surfaces equidistant from the projection source. Various considerations, practical and conceptual, provoke a departure from this ideal, pretty much right away: 1. I want the audience to be able to enter the space, so an opening of some kind is necessary 2. Circular rooms are not a common feature of buildings, so a special structure large enough, yet also temporary is required. Something halfway between a screen and a room.

The 3 drawings depict two scenarios. The first 2 drawings are of almost entirely circular structure with an opening portal peeled away or unrolled from the circular pattern into a flat section. As the projection continues on to this peeled away section, it is no longer equidistant on both sides from the source and the image becomes distorted. You can see this in Video 2, where I am moving the projection along a flat wall. Instead of trying to correct this, I decided to embrace it and build the structure in a way so that the physical line of the wall follows the angle of the projection as it distorts. Drawing 3 illustrates a furthering of this idea where half of the structure is an ideal circular shape and the other half is a long wall rising up on either end, again mimicking the manner in which the projection distorts.

In each scenario the structure is constructed from commonly available light sheet material framed on wooden struts. Two materials that seem particularly suitable are coreplast (translucent corrugated plastic) and pegboard (masonite with holes in it). Coreplast is attractive because it can be rear and front projected. Pegboard could be painted white on the interior projection surface, while the holes would allow light from the projection to spill out which would spill out on to the external walls echoing the bullet holes in the warehouse (see drawing 2).