Martin Rieser:

HOSTS
An Interactive Cinema work for Bath Abbey
Supported by Bath Film Festival 2005

Dates: Bath Abbey Church 9th-27th February 2006 Monday-Saturday 10am-6.00pm

Description

HOSTS is an ambitious project inspired by the motif of Jacob's Ladder on the West front of Bath Abbey. Bristol-based media artist Martin Rieser will hang five giant screens at strategic points of the Abbey space. Wearing a special ultra-sound badge and wireless earphones, the participant in HOSTS triggers the presence of a variety of evanescent projected video characters. As the participant approaches a screen, these individual characters or messengers appear to move forwards from a deep space and come into focus. If the participant then moves on, the characters too pass onwards from screen to screen, keeping pace with them. In this way, once a participant has entered the installation they become part of the story space. By standing in front of a screen they will eventually be paired with and addressed directly through a series of aphorisms by their individual messenger.

Concept

HOSTS combines poetry performance, animation and cinema in a unique blend. The words of the spoken and animated aphorisms are apparently those of humans, fraught with ambiguity and misunderstanding. Perverse and fragile, the aphorisms hover between the portentous and the mundane, inflected over and over into different meanings by the messengers. We are captured by the messengers and hurled into their drama in the same way that an unwilling passenger in a train can be given someone's life story. This is not always a comfortable experience. HOSTS is intended as a spiritually enhancing experience for a broad audience, not usually drawn to a media art gallery. [More....]