Window Mediation (Grantham)

2022. Mixed media installation. 43” x 29” x 16”.
Recycled LCD screens, electronics, 2 x Raspberry Pi, camera, prismatic filter, mini CCFL backlights, LED lights, anodized aluminum, plastic, acrylic, hardware, rare-earth magnets, silver chain and clasps, binder clips.

The window is the original technological interface mediating between us and our outdoor environment. A window separates us physically from the “outdoors”, insulates and protects us; it’s transparency allows us to become observers of an “other” or “object of study”, where the visual sensation is separated from other modalities. Whatever the view we see through the window, it is always framed, suggesting the importance of “viewed content” and a privileged viewing perspective, calculated and designed for visual pleasure.

A window, in this sense, is the first screen. Two thousand years after the first documented glass windows, we are inundated by the ubiquity of modern LCD screens: I am currently reading this text on one. There are few other objects we spend as much time “looking at” without acknowledging. We look “through the screen” at a virtual object, without realizing we are looking at light filtered through a matrix of shifting liquid crystal. Like the window, it is an interface to a world which appears both flat and richly three-dimensional in its virtuality.

At the centre of the work is the relationship between inside and outside spaces; how does our perception of one define the other. Partial video-painting, partial contemporary ”stained glass”, the work presents site-specific videos and live camera feeds viewed through dismantled-yet-functional LCD panels, simultaneously projecting an image and retaining a see-through transparency: in this manner we see video of the surrounding environment while also seeing the actual surrounding environment through the screen transparency. This final layer of technological mediation and framing - the window - remains in dialogue with the looping videos as the outdoor conditions fluctuate and change.

Photos by Paul Litherand.