Interactive installation, 2009
Original title : Point d’orgue
Fermata takes place in a room where a display window gives onto a passing public
place (street, square…). At the far end of the room the image of the street is video-projected in real time, filmed from inside, along with sound. This mirror image is visible from the street, through the window.
As soon as one or more visitors enter the room, the video’s speed is disturbed by their movements and gestures. This behavior depends on the person closest to the screen. If the visitor stops, the image is frozen but a vibration, which reacts to the slightest gesture, lives on. The sound is suspended, like a drive head remaining active. While image and sound are frozen, the camera goes on recording the image of the street: if the visitor moves again, the video starts up again, speeded up, and becomes gradually synchronized with the real time outside.
The apparatus introduces an endless mise en abyme: a circular, burlesque relation of observation, surveillance and control between all the protagonists present and their images. Passers-by see themselves in a mirror controlled by other observers, who are themselves part and parcel of the scene seen through the window. In the room, the toings and froings are introduced between the real passage of time in the street, its projected and “enactable” double opposite it, the visitor responsible for the action on the image, the other people present in the room, passers-by who may stop to take a look at the people looking at them, and so on.
Everyone is “in the image” – an image made public at variable levels depending on the intervention methods of their bodies and their eyes. The illusion of a power over time becomes the springboard for a generalized loop of exhibition and collective interaction.
