Proposal for LG Building, Korea
2005 / Proposal

Walking into the LG building, you encounter a freestanding, organically shaped glass sculpture. Behind it's sleek curvilinear skin, are a matrix of LCD monitors mounted edge to edge. You are reflected in the monitors, the sculpture is looking at you. As you move around the sculpture it is evident that your movement is causing other video images to be juxtaposed with your reflected image. On the screen you see that behind you a group of executives are walking briskly towards the building exit. You turn to see them and realize that their presence is part of the memory of the space, something from a time before now.

As you move backwards, the imagery slowly takes on a deep red hue, the shadows gain in opacity, the video is saturated in color. The physical environment around the sculpture is suffused with the rich red color from the screens. The overall mood is pensive and contemplative. A woman enters the building and walks past you to the elevator banks. Her movement is reflected on the screens and causes new archived video imagery to overlay on top of both of you. Slivers of white imagery begin to permeate the screens, like dappled sunlight through a curtain. Soon the red imagery is all but gone, the screens are screaming with white light, illuminating the lobby space. Overly exposed images of workmen are primary on the sculpture, giving off a heavenly glow. You see yourself there with them, basking in the white light.

For the LG office building project I propose a free standing interactive video sculpture.

Resident in this piece are ideas pertaining to: nodal (non-linear) time, the humanization of man in the contemporary context, the saturation of life with ideas, emotions and experience, the recording of events over time (creating a memory of space) and new meanings established through the interactive juxtaposition of images.

The physical manifestation of the sculptural shape speaks to man's dilemma between the logocentric world which he has created and the natural world which created him (man vs. nature).

The sculpture will function as an observer of events, capturing video from its environment. It has a start date at which it begins to capture video and can store up to a decade or more onto a group of computers. Participants movement cause past video files to be layered over a live feed . Custom written tracking software uses movement to effect what video is called from memory as well as to manipulate the physical properties of the final image. The video imagery will slowly change colors from cold icy semi-monochromatic blue grays to richly saturated red with deep black shadows to light and effervescent emerald greens to a brilliant almost blown out white. The surrounding environment will be awash in these colors, much the way a Dan Flavin piece saturates the space around it. The shift in colors will take place slowly, addressing the saturation of life with ideas, emotions and experience. Events from minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years past are layered on top of each other, in varying opacity and speeds. The resultant images are a collision of the past and the present.

The sculpture is an organic faceted plate glass shape standing approx 14' tall x 20'wide x 8' deep. The plate glass will be mounted onto an internal welded steel armature which will also hold the matrix of LCD screens mounted edge to edge. This will create a three dimensional video wall. Cameras mounted at regular intervals into the sculpture will capture imagery from the environment surrounding it. Much like Brancusi's Bird in Space, it will be at once and object in space and simultaneously wholly reflective, hence invisible.