Twilight viewing Friday June 5th, from 8 - 9 PM
ROVER
2015
algorithmic video and sound installation
ROVER is a mechatronic imaging device inserted into quotidian space, transforming the sights and sounds of the everyday into dreamlike cinematic experience. A kind of machine observer or probe, it knows very little of what it sees.
Using computational lightfield capture, ROVER records all light incident through a scene. Bounded in a physical sense by the system of motors and belts delimiting its 2-dimensional plane of travel, nonetheless it explores the world before it. It strains outwards from this grid into space it cannot readily inhabit: our space. It records sequential images to document where it is, when it is. Later, through an algorithmic manipulation of those images, we witness its search through a past of imperfect moments, synthesizing dreamlike views of the spaces and scenes it previously inhabited.
While looking, ROVER also listens. It records and extracts audio using machine-listening techniques, retrieving sounds we would otherwise dismiss. Just as images are ceaselessly churned by the device, sounds are revisited and reshaped until they are no longer commonplace.
The result is a kind of cinema that follows the logic of dreams: suspended but still mobile, familiar yet infinitely variable in detail. Indeed, the places we visit through ROVER’s motility are the kinds of places we find ourselves in dreams: cliffside, seaside, bedside, adrift and unable to return home, or trapped in the corners of those homes.
Black Box Festival website: http://www.blackboxfestival.org/robert-twomey/