Interior Design

MFA thesis installation. Electronic solar tracking, live video-based sensing for audience interactivity. New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles, 2003. 25ft X 30 ft. Custom electronics, mechanical design and software. Awarded First Prize, David Bermant Foundation Award for 2003.

Two coelostat sun-trackers pushed sunlight into an installation space. Inspired by the room Camera Obscura. An attempt to penetrate the "black box" of cinematic space with a site-specific intervention.

The installation Interior Design is an attempt to:

Assemble, in a shared physical field, the antagonistic (and anachronistic) beams of machine vision, human sight, and the rays of the sun- the progenitor of all optical experience.

Invert the status of the mobilized observer- the explorer, mapper, penetrator of both geographical and cultural otherness through "sightseeing". In a reversal of these outward vectors of desire and curiosity, this room (and its occupants) become the subject of the disembodied gaze.

Physically puncture the black box in which media art usually resides. Within this newly self-conscious interiority, the observer is denied the "infinite horizon" of virtuality. Other, unacknowledged or forgotten ways in which human beings interact with space are foregrounded.

The camera obscura model is thus re-territorialized in the context of contemporary vision- as a site observed, penetrated and "painted" by the Outside. - Sukumaran

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