Embodied Distortion

The aim of this piece is to immerse the viewer in an environment that expresses altered sensory perception. It is full of colour and movement, the viewer feels disorientated by dizzying video projections as they weave their way in between harsh geometric shapes. The two films represent different types of environments (‘urban’ and ‘nature’) and my experience of them in the early stages of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome where movement through the world produced a feeling of sensory overload. In particular, I was unusually aware of my own motion relative to the hard surfaces and edges of urban landscapes. The urban films were processed using scientific software (MATLAB), employing optic flow algorithms to isolate the movement and plot it out as ‘flow fields’ (arrows indicating the main directions of perceived motion) which were overlaid on the original footage. This produces a disorienting, unsettling effect. While the urban film is flooded with fast moving arrows, the natural film is gentler with fewer overlaid flow fields, reflecting my greater tolerance of natural environments with their soothing rhythms. The sculptural shapes use a strong directional motif, being made up of sharp triangles reflecting the motion flow arrows in the videos, they also serve as surfaces to break up the video over multiple planes: obscuring, distorting and creating shadows. The arrangement puts the two films in conflict to some extent, but as they develop they begin to physically overlap suggesting the beginnings of resolution and recovery as my greater tolerance of natural environments begins to invade the urban. This work has developed alongside my continued recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome.