The Presence Project: Body

(Crux, 1983-7; Incidence of Catastrophe, 1987-88; I Believe It Is an Image in Light of the Other, 1991-2; Tall Ships, 1992; Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine), 1991-2; Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place, 1990; Switchblade, 1998-9; Crossbow, 1999; Guilt, 2006)

text and corporeality

projection and physicality

caesurae

Viewer’s gesture of ‘looking’ plays on the visitor’s perception of ‘presence’.

In these circumstances, Quasha and Stein suggest, the ‘performance’ of Viewer lies in the visitor’s awareness and activation of the space before the projection, for ‘(t)he real ‘event’ is the performative space itself - a site, the very declaration of which allows the complex awareness of an engaged viewer. The event is an emerging awareness’ (Quasha & Stein 2001: 24).

Consistently with this, Hill observes video’s production of ‘a reflexive space of difference’ (Vischer 1995: 14), its ‘capacity of having a presence and a distance at the same time’ (Hill in Vischer 1995: 9).

In Viewer and Standing Apart, the quality of ‘being present’ appears in the effect of multiplication: a presence performed in the absence of the figure; in the acting out of the ‘past’ times in the ‘real time’ of looking.

It is in this paradoxical occupation of the present-tense action of viewing that these images appear to gain ground toward the visitor, even as their 'flatness,' their identity as representation, as absence, is quite clearly stated.

VIEWER (1996)

The dual location of such images plays on the media’s 'transportation of vision' (Weber 1996: 116), its claim to presentness, producing the uncanny return of a sense of 'liveness' in mediation - a counter-intuitive effect that works to emphasize a phenomenon of closeness, however distant these figures are seen to be.

Articulated here is a reversal and re-staging, in mediation, of the duality and division that Walter Benjamin ascribes to the experience of the auratic object, which is recognised in ‘the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be’ (Benjamin 1992: 216).

In these respects, these projective installations work against the erasures in which 'mediatization' would ostensibly function to foreground the performance of presence.