>subcapePROOF images

>subscpaePROOF video

>subscapePROOF audio

sub_scapePROOF is an evocative installation aimed at the interstices of metaphorical truth and material evidence in the aesthetics and language of global media transmission.

For sub_scape PROOF, artists Waterson and Richards have populated the sub_scape system with video of the pulpit-like rhetoric of the professional politician (the recent American and Australian elections, and the Iraqi and Palestinian conflicts); ‘secular confessional’ TV such as Jerry Springer and Dr Phil; advertisements, and TV reportage with its increasingly value-added, Baroque display.
Mapped through this video/audio data stream are literary texts that represent some axiomatic notions about truth, discourse and affect. Jorge Luis Borges’ parable of language The Library of Babel; a Sufi text titled Seeing which contrasts the western-leaning, neo-Aristotlian philosopher Avicenna’s focus on universals,, with Sufist consciousness of the ‘now’; a short poem Every American Wins a Prize, by Australian Pam Brown, which acts as a commentary on commercialisation and the Americanisation of topos; and an excerpt from "..and if, taking the eye of a man most recently dead..." Descartes via feminist Luce Irigaray , who is known for her complex linguistic, philosophical and psychoanalytic precepts.
As the sub_scape system maps these texts onto the video stream, key words in the texts – for example, trust, insinuate, fact – trigger the introduction of another set of data, representing a third type of ‘truth’: the annual reports of various multinational companies involved in the insurance, telecommunications and manufacturing.
sub_scapePROOF critiques the notion of evidential, superficial “truth” in a post-faith age. By mapping philosophy and corporate data back onto the language of superpower politics and western, pathological tropes of fear and anxiety, sub_scapePROOF generates a playful and ironic critique on the traditional politics and power dynamics of knowledge-through-mapping.
By playing on the emergent aesthetic and sense-making behaviours of the datasets, by using the dynamics of turbulence, balance, recursive effect and pattern formation in the data, sub_scapePROOF transmits an affect of ‘truth” more baroque than Cartesian, and “meaning” more symbolic than fixed.

subscapePROOF is currently on exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia.

>Catalogue for the exhibition

>subscapePROOF catalogue entry

Physical description:
sub_scapePROOF is housed in a periscope object for single visitor use. The periscope has an in-built screen. The visitor views the periscope display from a seated position. Turning the periscope changes the data flows and effects. subscapePROOF can also be configured for alternate display such as wall projection.

Periscope dimensions: Approximately 140 cm H and 55 cm Diameter, weight 26 kg.
Materials: Aluminium, moulded resin, rubber handles. VC to midi box, midi box, LCD screen included.
Hardware requirements: Mac CPU running OSX, min 1ghz processor, min 512 meg ram. Stereo headphones.