PAN & ZOOM (presentation)

The performative power of image-making and image-viewing

PAN & ZOOM take the effects inscribed in the global language of cinema and turn them into performative and participatory image-making apparatuses. Jondi Keane and Kaya Barry’s installation invites visitors to collaborate in the construction of the images in order to re-explore relations between media technologies and embodied experience. The result is an expanded, amplified and dilated experience of the performative power of image-making and image-viewing.

PAN activates an accumulating collection of moving panoramic images – provided by Kaya Barry and PSi Fluid States participants from around the world – that visitors may interactively inhabit. The visitor manipulates relationships between an image projector mounted upon a dolly track, and a trackpad that scrolls the projected panorama. The live event of constructing-perceiving panoramic tracking shots opens up in ways that expand sensory experience beyond usual peripheries.

ZOOM co-opts the ‘dolly-zoom’ effect in cinema – wherein the camera zooms in while moving backward or zooms out while moving forward – resulting in the image expanding to amplify an intense moment of realisation. Hitchcock developed this technique in Vertigo to show audiences how the protagonist experiences his fear of heights. Jondi Keane pulls apart the double movement of the camera effect by himself performing the pulling back and forth of a moving wall as a backdrop. Moments of realisation are created between visitors who take up the camera operation, and an improvising actor’s role, to accompany Keane’s durational wall moving. An updating collection of filmic moments made throughout the installation duration screen ‘on-set’.

Amongst the pervasive languages of cinema, photography, television and mobile media, PAN & ZOOM explores how audiences here are performative inter-actors, rendering the image toward the body’s expansive inhabitations of space, and challenging the grip of technological seduction.