Physical Fiction: Electronic Installations

Sara Roberts is an artist who for the last eight years has been working with interactive video installations, making portraits of common relationships; mother and child; watcher and watched; person and thing; husband, wife and friends. Video and physical space work together in the installations to establish tensions which involve the visitor in a kind of social sculpture. Computers are used to sense presence, sequence video events, and provide an underlying, biological-seeming tendency to the installations. The work occurs more in the world than on the screen. The visitor participates as a whole person, not just with eyes and mind.

In Early Programming, Sara’s first interactive piece, the visitor sits down at a kitchen table with a computer “mom” (named MARGO) and is effectively recruited to the role of child. Since the computer is supposedly a neutral presence, Sara wondered what the effect would be if it said things that were less words than emotional tokens, as exchanges between parents and children often are: Why do I have to? Because I say you have to!
With a machine voice and an onscreen rectangle as an emotional indicator, which appears smaller and darker as her mood worsens, it is hard to mistake MARGO for anything but a machine. But the power of familiar words is strong and it is often difficult to tear visitors away from the argument.

Sara was commissioned to make The Digital Museum based on the theme of the museum in the age of computer technology. The installation explores the contemporary shift in emphasis from finding, naming, and categorizing, to seeing the relationships between that which has been collected, and ourselves, and questioning objectivity. A physical relationship seemed like a first step, thus when a finger reaches through the glass and touches an object a varied vocal response is generated.

Elective Affinities

Elective Affinities was adapted from Goethe’s novella and involves questions of passion and commitment in marriage. In 1806, at the age of 57, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe finally married the woman he had lived with for eighteen years, the mother of his five children. He then fell in love with Minna Herzleib, a young woman of eighteen. This affair provoked him to write the novella with the odd title, Elective Affinities, a term used at the time in chemistry to describe a perfect molecular attraction. Goethe’s metaphor has survived as we still describe sexual attraction as chemistry.

The video installation brings the characters from the novella, the devoted couple and their two friends, into the present where they sit together in a car suspended in time. Each character runs through a constantly fluctuating range of emotions affected by the emotional states of the other three. This is where a network of computers becomes useful for a narrative. Each character runs its own “emotional engine” which shifts when a glance is sent by another character, bringing new interpretations of past events.

Their expressions are stored on laser video disc, and called up by the computer as appropriate to the current mood. On the walls of the gallery are the drafts of the thoughts for each character, each square becoming a memory, each memory interpreted 12 different ways. Choosing a pivotal moment in their complicated relationship, writing out and videotaping each characters thoughts, Sara attempts an extension of literature into the sculpture realm, bringing thoughts off the page and into space and time.