Understanding Echo : Physical Diegetic space embodying narrative

The main direction of Rieser's 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 he is 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 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 ‘collective unconscious’ where “memory, dreams and reflections” could rise to the surface.

In the centre of a darkened room stand a number of translucent panels displaying large digital photographic montages. In the centre space of these images 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 middle aged and from time to time she rises from the depths and talks slowly in short poetic fragments or aphorisms. The audience may not immediately realise it, but the form of these spoken fragments becomes ever more personal as they get nearer to the pool. The large changing digital montage projections around the pool represent combinations of memory and are organised in four quadrants reflecting aspects of childhood, identity, nature and memory. 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 figure rising from the waters loosely relates to the nymph , in myth forced to forever speak the last lines of her lover Narcissus’s speeches and trapped in a pool for eternity. The female spirits that inhabit wells and rivers in various folklores,such as the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian Legend, are all alluded to by the form of the work. as is the drowning Orphelia in Hamlet. The woman reviews her life and the sense of powerlessness her situation has brought. The poetic fragments are intended to resemble a mix of colloquial musings and the timeless incisiveness we associate with poetic aphorism. They vary from the general to the intimate. The woman is by turns embittered, flirtatious and coquettish, disillusioned and enthusiastic. Her character moves through a wide emotional range, returning obsessively to her situation and the unhappy love affair which caused it. The order of the fragments is unimportant. There is no linear temporal curve involved. The woman inhabits the present , but lives in the past. On the audience she projects her loves and fears. We are her blank screen.

The installation created a responsive environment using a combination of still digital imagery and projected video clips. The installation was controlled by a video camera and software which detects audience movement within three pre-programmed zones around the central projection area. The software used was custom written in Java by Simon Yuill, controlling a fast hard disk and data projector. The projector is mounted directly above the pool (see attached diagrams).Via infra red sensing, software detected audience presence in any one of three zones: Distant, Intermediate and intimate and reacted by playing a corresponding projection in the pool. The anticipated movement of more than one audience member is compensated for by the logic of the programme. Each video fragment is coded for audience distance and movement within a zone and is triggered by preprogrammed patterns of audience activity. The projected video fragments change without obvious repetition over a 40 minute cycle.