Jane Prophet
Circles of Light (a robotic installation). Plan: Arms in Top Position.
A new commission for LAUNCH. Jane Prophet ©1997
Jane Prophet is best known for her work on TechnoSphere (an artificial life, world wide web project - exhibited DEAF 95, Rotterdam and the Foto Biennale, Enschede, Holland). Pick a Card was exhibited as part of The Art Casino at the Barbican Gallery in 1995. In 1996 she produced Swarm, as part of Ex-Machina for Camerawork in London and Zone Gallery in Newcastle. Her most recent work is the interactive installation Sarcophagus, shown at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester for the 1997 VideoPositive Festival.
In TechnoSphere, an internet project, invented creatures roam across fractal savannas, evolving according to mathematical laws. Their breeding may be loveless, but it survives. Elsewhere in Prophet's work, love and survival cross each other at new tangents: in games to play with love-hearts' sweeties; in the industrial mausoleum where medical visions inhabit a perspex mummy.
The cyborg: half human and half machine. Evolution: diversity in an unsettled and unsettling world.
Circles of Light are dances of passion, where the entanglement of mechanism and organism is a waltz of two species.
Sean Cubitt 1997
Prophet's Proposal for LAUNCH
Action begins as the presence of the audience trigger the movement of the structure. The two arms start with the monitors held apart, close to the ground. They slowly move, circling, the monitors rising with this, until the screens are face to face. Then the arms lower, the next sequence begins.
The live action sequences are shot using the same technique, camera movements with 360 degree pans of land and cityscapes, with computer generated images matted into the background. The images illustrate a series of dualisms: rural and urban, personal and corporate, old industries and new.
Video tape material will be reworked and adapted for each new site.