Flexer & Sandiland

The fascination with Camera Obscura has captured audience imagination drawing people worldwide from Victorian times to the present day. The spectacle of entering a dark room through which to witness and actively peer out to the surrounding landscape is both theatrically enticing and technically mysterious. An Obscure Camera develops these ideas for a 21st-century context.

We enter a large dark space and are immersed by a multitude of ornate Rococo frames projected onto the surrounding walls and ceiling. Each of these frames contains a close-up view of the live outdoor environment outside of the building. As we walk around the space, the frames move with us, traveling in accordance with our speed and direction. New subjects enter and pass through the frames as their viewpoint changes. We now find that we can begin to scan, track, and follow different features in the outdoor spaces, including its inhabitants, through our motion within the installation.

Evoking aspects of contemporary surveillance culture, the installation gives us the power to explore, seek, and inspect anything and anyone we find interesting. In doing so, we navigate the fine line between observer and voyeur, physically enacting the choices made by the countless algorithms that analyse our daily lives.

Interactive Installation

Thursday, June 11 to Sunday, June 14 Open 11am - 5pm

Performances

Sunday 14 June at 1pm and 2 pm

Obscure Camera Choreographic Interventions

The Obscure Camera has been further developed to encompass a series of choreographic interventions performed in open public spaces adjacent to the installation. This situation re-addresses the balance between observer and observed. Highlighting portraiture and composition, performers are given the agency to look back and acknowledge installation visitors, creating a fleeting intimacy mediated by the technology.

This aspect of Obscure Camera was created through a series of classes with our local Flexer & Sandiland ‘Acting Our Age’ movement and improvisation community class participants. The work follows an improvised score with some set events in response to the site