video

The screen will be made up of an array of RGB (fully adjustable colour) light-box panels. Each lightbox is an oversized pixel. The lightbox panels will be made from sandblasted, toughened glass. The sandblasting will disperse the light evenly over the whole panel and the toughened glass will make the sculpture vandal proof—an unfortunate but necessary measure for the city of Dublin.

The screen will be made up of an array of RGB (fully adjustable colour) light-box panels. Each lightbox is an oversized pixel. The lightbox panels will be made from sandblasted, toughened glass. The sandblasting will disperse the light evenly over the whole panel and the toughened glass will make the sculpture vandal proof.
 
The proposed sculpture integrates the aesthetics of interactive, electronic technologies with public, architectural spaces. It introduces the concept of Telepresence—the ability to see and act over a distance. Via electronic networks, it invites the public to interact and affect real public space in the Belfast Docklands.

“Remote video cameras and remotely navigated devices... exemplify the notion of being ‘present’ in a physically remote location... Telepresence can be thought of as one example of representational technologies used to enable action, that is, to allow the viewer to manipulate reality through representations.”
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, (Cambridge, Mass: 2001), p.16
 
A triangular, interdependent paradigm is crucial to the underlying concept of the sculpture. It administers interplay between:

1. electronic data-feed and the sculpture,
2. viewer and sculpture­, in the real sculptural space,
3. and viewer and sculpture in virtual space—via an internet application.

The objective is to create a work of art that simultaneously resides and communicates in real-world space as well as that new world space of the internet, giving rise to a two-tiered communication. Not only can an observer viewing this project instantly appreciate the pixilated graphics, in the material sculptural space, but so too are these graphics affected via the dialectic of Telepresence and the constant fluctuation of RSS weather data.

This bipolar dialectic attains even greater conceptual depth by semantically alluding to the juxta position of old world and new world economics—the new world embodied by the sculpture itself, and the old world inherent in the site location. Historically one of the most important maritime gateways in Europe, Belfast Harbour has a deeply rooted importance in seabourne trade. By appointing such electronic artworks the Belfast Harbour Commissioners assume a position of knowledge and appreciation of new economic methods, and their importance in the transfer of information, an appointment that was historically held by global shipping networks.