Invention

2014
Mark Lewis Exhibition design in collaboration with Adam Bandler and Mark Wasiuta. Director of photography Martin Testar

The large-scale installation Invention is based on a simple, yet hugely provocative fictional assumption. The premise of the work is that a parallel world developed in which the technologies of the moving image were not invented until the early twenty-first century. From this starting point, Invention speculates about how we would look at images if cinema, television and online moving-image platforms did not exist, or were just on the point of being introduced.

What results is an environment in which there is no longer an easy escape from our immediate surroundings, but rather those surroundings become subject to the experience of looking. Through the manipulation of reflection and light, as well as the simple recording and displacement of images of reality using the newly discovered video camera, this alternative 2014 offers a different kind of visual experience from that of the screen and the narrative of film.

Walking around and through it, we might think about our usual patterns of image consumption and what their limitations or constraints might be. By being confronted with an idea that never happened, we are given an opportunity to reflect on what our actual world excludes. – CE