Video made for projection, for the Time Based Arts group exhibition in Athens, Greece.

Dimensions: Variable

Credits
Concept, Video: Dimitris Fotiou
Performance: Pinelopi Drakou
Sound: Soundrangers Sound Effects

Summary:
"[..] In 1844, Samuel Morse invented Morse code, enabling people to communicate instantly over long distances [..] A few years later, a teenage girl called Kate Fox in Rochester, New York began communicating with the spirit of a murdered peddlar by rapping on the walls of her house, using her own crude alphanumerical system, a kind of "folk" appropriation of Morse code. [..] Her psychic activities caused a sensation parallel to the telegraph, sparking the New American Spiritualist Movement, which is still in existence today."

(Oursler in Neri, 2001) source: The Presence Project: Tony Oursler, 22/09/2006

Psychic and metaphysic contacts in relation to history of telecommunications inspire Tony Oursler to create Influence Machine (2000). Oursler uses video projections of figures such as the Fox sisters or ghosts, telling stories form another spatiotemporal dimension, onto trees and smoke.

tr@nsfer is a reference on Tony Oursler's work. The sound messages originate from the IBM database, www.ibm.com, they refer to the issue of time and they are addressed to the user by the machine. Forests and trees, as a space of ghosts' appearance, are becoming a space of virtual characters' appearance that are found on the internet. The female figure relives moments of her online function and interaction with internet users, transferring emotions such as "waiting", "inquiry", "duration".

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