From Here, 2007

Dallas developer, Billingsley Company, commissioned a large-scale interactive work, entitled, From Here, for the entrance of their One Arts Plaza building. One Arts Plaza is situated in the heart of Dallas’ Arts District in Texas. The building is located on the museum campus opposite the Dallas Museum of Art.

 

From here is a generative video installation centered on the non-linear collision in and of memory. Active portraits of people and place continuously wash over one another in overlapping layers, merging past and present.

From the artworks inception, two high definition cameras begin randomly recording and storing slices of memories from the lobby environment. These recordings create a massive digital library that the artwork in turn creates in real time in four overlapping layers, literally building a visible, transparent, and fluid memory of One Arts Plaza and its visitors over time.

This commission presented Schatz with an opportunity to advance his explorations in the creation of memory and the idea of reality as perception. It experiments with how reality is defined and whether revisiting an image of oneself on-screen can affect memories of a particular event or period of time. Focusing on the phenomenon of how multiple observers can share the same experience and come away with separate and distinct memories of it, two independent memory works are installed in the entrance of One Arts Plaza. They will both be born at the same time, establishing their own unique understanding of that space over the next eight years.

While standing between the two works, viewers will see themselves on both screens juxtaposed with video memories unique to each screen’s perspective on the past. At this point the viewers and the screens enter into a feedback loop whereby the works and viewers are each developing and affecting the others’ memories of that point in time. Each video wall measures 9’ x 9’ and the artwork consists of custom software, two computers, two cameras and twelve plasma displays.

Following the creation of From Here, Schatz created, My City, a generative video installation by Lincoln Schatz. This installation, at the Blackstone Hotel, expands the relationships between buildings and new media art by engaging both with the hotel and the city of Chicago.