Understanding Echo:
Martin Rieser

Interactive Cinema Environment

Digital Cafe Watershed Media Centre Daily 12.00-7.00pm
Monday 24th July- Tuesday 30th July (closes at 4.00 pm on last day)

On the wall of the darkened room stands a screen displaying large digital
photographic montages. In the central space of the room is a shallow
circular pool of water. In the silence of the installation the audience can
make out the drip of water. Flickering in the pool is the image of a woman's
face, submerged below the surface. She is of indeterminate age and from time
to time she rises from the depths and talks slowly in short poetic fragments
or aphorisms. The audience may not immediately understand, but the form of
these spoken fragments becomes ever more personal as they get nearer to the
pool. The large changing digital montage projections in front of the pool
represent combinations of memory, reflecting aspects of childhood, identity
and nature. The spatialised narrative and the poetic monologue are fused
together in the environment of the piece. Once an audience enters the
installation room they are part of the diegetic space of the narrative and
are continually addressed directly or obliquely by the character of Echo.

The main direction of Rieser's recent work has been in examining the nature
of theatrical and interactive installation spaces where poetry can be
re-imagined as a part of a hypertextual universe. In pursuing this direction
I am attempting to synthesise aspects of cinema, video art and more
primitive and associative spaces to create a narrative form based in a
physical environment, rather than a virtual one. While in his previous
installation Labyrinth a more directly theatrical route was chosen, the
Understanding Echo installation was an attempt to root interactive narrative
in a magical space corresponding to a part of the audience's