novelstalgia

installation at Chatham Historic Dockyard, Kent, for three rooms with 5.1 surround sound and projection-mapping, and eye-tracked sonification of a graphic score

Graphic score creation workshop. Scores were produced as part of the installation so that audience scores complimented the primary score which would then be played by score-viewers, via sonification of the eye-tracking camera

room 2 – comfort to engage with the new technologies are seemingly available but require complicity in further distancing material experience – a chair is adapted here to provide literal and figurative memory spikes

room 2 – projection mapping and a reference to embodiment. The moving images in room 2 were separately mapped to different walls. The (disem)body meanwhile lurks behind minimally opaque veils, almost joining us in viewing mid-century materials about new technologies. Ivan Sutherland, Ray Bradbury, the Data Glove. Novelstalgia appears at once contemporary and antiquated.

room 3 – the domestic objects of nostalgia. We can bring novelty home, the eternal repository. In doing so we metaphorically cannibalise it, to complete the cycle

room 3 – the commodity symbols of nostalgia. We grab a surrogate memory as we exit the exhibition, to prove to others and ourselves that our memory was valid, based on the real

audiences and friends – testing the technologies involved people and always produced the same results – a delight in the novelty afforded – both by the technology and the body's eyes as control interfaces

infra red technologies are affected by ambient infra red levels, which exist in daylight and in artificial lighting. The eye-tracking camera was condition-dependent and sensitive, which makes it a precarious choice for an installation