‘Death To Yevgeny Nourish’ is an installation work being shown from Oct 20th – 31st at the ‘New Genres’ group show, at RMIT School of Art Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.
The piece uses a live fish housed inside a tank to which a small LCD screen is attached. The screen flickers visuals, while the fish (a Japanese Fighter fish) swims jubilantly ~ creating a wispy silhouette against an ambient rainbow of colour.
The piece does not contain any sound. However for this video I use the ambient sound from the gallery. Other works in the gallery that contain sound bleed together, creating the soundscape for the exhibition.
This piece conveys a number of ideas. One of them is the idea of ‘domesticating’ audio-visual media – or more precisely – lounging the internet experience, and making a comment about bringing immersive audio-visual installation home. I wanted to create a kind of lava lamp or fish tank – what I consider to be household ambient objects – to make the case that this kind of ‘media art’ might find its way into a lounge room or bedroom, just as a television or computer can become the centrepiece of a living space.
I called the piece ‘Death To To Yevgeny Nourish’, which is a line from the film Existenz (1999) by David Cronenberg. In the final sequences of the film, central protagonists Ted Pikel and Allegra Gellher awaken from a long virtual game experience, only to accuse and kill the games creator, Yevgeny Nourish, for creating ‘the most efective deforming of reality’.
In this way I use the piece to point to some of the ethical considerations artists are faced with when creating immersive, virtual experience. The idea of wanting to create an experience that completely enveloped an audience seemed like an odd thing to consider – almost sinister, and in many ways for me raises a lot of interesting artistic and political questions.
Visuals created in Processing.
mattleaf.com 2008