DIS)APPERARANCES is a video installation by Cinema and Media Studies major Jessica Dill. For her senior thesis, Dill spent two semesters developing and creating this piece, which is now up for viewing in Jewett.
The installation consists of three videos projected on three of the four walls of the room in which it is installed. The videos are a "mash-up remix of faces and voices" that Dill gathered from the popular video sharing web site, YouTube.
When asked how she chose which videos to include, Dill said that her decision to use video blogs came only later in the process of making the piece and that she picked the videos that seemed the most aesthetically interesting. The videos were then edited and layered and accompanied by a complex mix of sounds.
The installation is both visually and conceptually interesting, and it works very well as an engaging space. The sounds, sights and intimacy of the space made it easy to sit down and take it all in. It takes a few minutes inside the dark room to really see and hear the piece. The videos are layered such that the identities of the subjects of the blogs are obscured and fused with one another. No one person is recognizable. Similarly, the sound is layered so that one cannot decipher what is being said. This pushes the viewer to see the sounds and images for merely what they are—sounds and images.
The meaning and identities that are supposed to give the original videos importance are removed to expose a world in which people are seen and heard, but not present. In an effort to project themselves in a simulated space, the individuals become as real as the simulated internet space that they inhabit.
Though the artist's intentions may differ, her video installation is in dialogue with ideas of simulation in various other art forms— namely, painting.
When viewing the installation, my mind could not help but think of an article by Reinaldo Laddaga, in which he discusses Sarduy's ideas on the "drive to simulate." According to Sarduy, the drive to simulate is both a human and an animal drive.The transvestite who simulates a woman so much as to "over imitate" and erase the metaphor all together (both the imitator and the imitated are lost in a "whirlwind of laughter and horror") has much in common with the butterfly, which simulates its environment to erase any sign of its existence. Sarduy likens this to the work of a modern painter who suppresses the distance between the image and that which it is supposed to represent so much so as to cause the "death of the image."
Similarly, Dill's piece takes on simulation of a real space via YouTube as a subject matter, in which the subjects' drive to project themselves into that space renders them absent. Their appearance is then the cause of their disappearance as they attempt to exist in a virtual space. Here Dill writes, "Everyone sees and everyone is seen, but no one is present." However, this piece goes further, beyond the YouTube-caused erasure of self, to erase completely identity and message by simulating the simulated virtual space. This double simulation then renders nothing more than images and sounds, in the end just an indefineable experience. Like Sarduy's transvestite and butterfly, the videos cause the erasure of the metaphor and the birth of something entirely different.
The success of the piece is grounded in the fact that the images and sounds created by the artist are interesting in and of themselves. The ability to see a semblance of what is human in the layered videos is enticing when paired with the barely recognizable speech. Furthermore, the subject matter that has become a common pondering of our time—that of internet's ability to take us away from real experiences and relationships and fling us into an imaginary world disguised as a real one—is again enticing. However, the piece also has the ability to work on a more abstract level in which one can think of all that is communication, reality, art, simulation, etc. The combination of all three done successfully is a beautiful thing.
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