Re-staging the glance: Northroom – a polyoptic panorama

Metis (with Victoria Clare Bernie)
Northroom

The Lighthouse, Glasgow: 01.12.06-04.03.07
Palaggio di Parte Guelfa, Florence: 12.03.07-25.03.07
The Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh: 17.05.07-01.06.07
Royal Academy of Arts, London: 09.06.08-17.08.08

The structure and cinematic skin of Northroom references the curious ‘northern room’ of Robert Adam’s memorial to David Hume, designed in 1777 and constructed upon the side of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. A constellation of 31 video screens are located in relation to a distribution of marks (signifiers of events – scribings, cracks, weathering etc.) on the fabric of the tomb, turning the monument outside-in and displaying it as a kind of re-imagined polyoptic panorama. What results is a panorama of peripheral vision, a visually and acoustically fragmented dreamscape in which what is seen and heard is always the point of becoming something else. Some of the videos loop every few minutes, others run for an hour; some are fixed on the almost imperceptible movement of shadows over the surface of the stone, others register fleeting incidental events, such as a fly momentarily alighting on the surface of the monument or the quivering of a spider’s web in the breeze. Each of the videos incorporates its own sound output. Originally commissioned for the Venice Architecture Biennale, the work was exhibited by invitation at numerous venues.