backRealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 6
© Gail Priest; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]
Alex Davies is a digital media artist working with sound and image integrations and responsive installations. His recent work Swarm, shown at Artspace in June/July this year, was an evolving audiovisual environment built from the live footage of viewers in the gallery captured while they watch the work. This is then played back in real time (with a slight ghostly lag), while a database of prior visitors is randomly composited creating a mixed environment of real and virtual, or in fact remembered bodies. The image constantly shifting across the width of the gallery creates a scoping sensation, and also triggers panning parameters in the sound bed. Swarm produces a disjunction between the viewer’s perception of themselves in time and space as they question which presences are real, which spectral. The strength of Davies’ work is that each element is perfectly integrated. The technology is not used as display (as is often the case in technically advanced new media investigations) but rather as the tool to serve the concepts. This is also the case in the work Filter Feeder currently exhibiting as part of Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art (p21). Davies has also recently exhibited Anchortronic Performance and Heterodyne at the Garage Festival, Germany and is involved in collaborations with robotics artists Time’s Up in Austria. http://schizophonia.com
