Clea T. Waite

 

KUR: (Sumerian ca. 3000 BC.)

The Great Unknown; Underworld; Mountain; Enemy Territory
"4-Dimensional", active, non-linear video installation: four stereoscopic video projections, quadraphonic audio, room installation, digital video. video:1996 / installation:1997.

Prizes

1997 Grand Prize winner, 'Dream Science '97'

Exhibitions

1997 European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, Germany.
1997 'Dream Science '97' Computer Graphics Grand Prix in STEC, Tokyo, Japan.

 

KUR

European Media Art Festival, Osnabrueck, Germany, 1997

Kur: Sumerian, ca 3000 BC.-

1) Underworld,

2) the Great Unknown,

3) Mountain,

4) Enemy Territory.

KUR is a four-channel, stereoscopic digital-video installation. The piece is an attempt to break the cinematic barriers of one dimensional time and two dimensional image space. Within the installation, four films play simultaneously. Sequences occur in causal or chronological order; rewinding, branching, harmonizing. Performers exchange roles, mirror one another, metamorphose in time and space.

KUR is enacted as a dance-poem. The film links ancient Sumerian myth with contemporary research in quantum physics. KUR requires the entire body as viewing apparatus, actively moving, participating in the film. In it, time is layered into the dimensions of space. The mysteries of the 20th century, the strange occurrences of post-Newtonian physics, are used in KUR as structural counterpoint to ancient formulas of the unknown. The verbal repetitions characteristic of Sumerian poetry are echoed in the composition of the scenes. The narrative structure follows a looping, spiraling, non-continuous path. The viewers move in the center, spin, and choose which screen to watch, which version of time and reality to experience.

 

KUR was created entirely using blue screen, "virtual" sets, and digital post-processing and is exhibited as four life-size, stereoscopic video projections built into a room, viewed with polarized glasses. The digital processing incorporates unique visualization techniques developed by the artist for this work.

 

© C. Waite, 1997