In our visit to the Whitney Biennial there was a piece I enjoyed because of the way it was shown. The piece was called A Very Long Line by Postcommodity which is a production team of Raven Chacon, Cristobal, and Kade L. Twist. The piece focuses on the border between the United States and Mexico which has been a big topic in our current political picture. The video was shown in a small room. There were four projectors each pointed at a different wall. It was filmed inside a moving car. All you see is grass and landscape behind bars and railing. The piece made me feel trapped behind all those bars but the sounds also were disorienting. It was so loud in there, all you hear is wind and breeze as the car travels along the rail. You also hear the passing of other cars as you would on a highway. Each projector showed a different video which was a different part of the border. The videos also played at different speeds so if you were looking at the video in front of you per say, it might be moving faster then the two videos to your left and right. This difference of speed affected your peripheral vision and made the video in front of you seem as if it were really moving. You actually for a quick second could feel transplaced into the area. The installation was designed to disorient which I thought it did really well. It also was designed to create a sort of amnesia feeling or condition to evoke this idea of forgetting ones origins. The origins being forgotten mostly by United States citizens the Indigenous status of people from the Western Hemisphere.
This piece got me thinking of the differences between a gallery installation and a piece that is shown in theater. It got me questioning if this piece would work and give the same feeling if it were shown in a theater and to answer my own question it wouldn’t. What makes the piece work in creating this atmosphere is that being surrounded by the four projectors displaying this video creates a disorienting feeling. If displayed only one screen I don’t think the piece would evoke the same feeling.
This is a link to the piece I found on youtube, you get a better sense of what I was describing but the effect is more moving in person.