We are sur­round­ed by fig­ures, sur­round­ed by speech, ideas, ex­pe­ri­ences, peo­ple are shar­ing with us what they want, or what they can. We are not re­al­ly the ones to de­cide what we want to hear.
Do we re­al­ly want to learn about oth­er peo­ple? What is com­mu­ni­ca­tion and how can we com­mu­ni­cate? How big is the lev­el of com­plex­i­ty to un­der­stand the oth­ers? How im­por­tant is what­ev­er we are lis­ten­ing to ev­ery­day? How big is the dai­ly in­put of use­less or use­ful in­for­ma­tion? What is use­less and what is use­ful? How can we de­fine im­por­tance?
The above were the thoughts that led me to my in­stal­la­tion “hear me now”. I am think­ing of our in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic lives, and the flow of to­day that wants us to be im­por­tant, per­sons who have some­thing to share and con­tribute to the lives of the oth­ers. Those thoughts made me place the view­er in the cen­ter of an in­stal­la­tion, who is sur­round­ed by pro­jec­tions of hu­man fig­ures who are talk­ing to them con­tin­u­ous­ly. They are talk­ing about ran­dom things, they are “jump­ing” from one top­ic to the oth­er, they speak all to­geth­er at the same time, they don’t care if the view­er is able to fol­low or not.
I in­vit­ed 15 dif­fer­ent peo­ple to come in the stu­dio and talk. I told them that they were able to talk about any­thing they want­ed. I didn’t lim­it them the­mat­i­cal­ly. I just want­ed them to be as nat­u­ral as pos­si­ble. They were alone in the stu­dio, and i left them free to talk about what ev­er they want­ed. All of them im­me­di­ate­ly start­ed talk­ing from one minute to an hour and a half. They were re­call­ing mem­o­ries, de­scrib­ing sit­u­a­tions, ex­press­ing ideas, brain­storm­ing, gen­er­al­iz­ing, or go­ing ab­so­lute­ly in­to per­son­al stuff.
The fig­ures are walk­ing from a dis­tance to the point that they have to be. When they fin­ish talk­ing, they walk back so they fade out, blur out and this is how they dis­ap­pear from the frame and then an oth­er per­son ap­pears on the screen. I had al­most 10 hours of raw footage, so i cre­at­ed four three hour long playlists which are loop­ing and nev­er the same per­son ap­pears more than in one screen at the same time.
The in­stal­la­tion is in a black paint­ed space around 7×7 me­ters with no phys­i­cal or ar­ti­fi­cial light source, four black screens in di­men­sions 2×3 me­ters, placed in front of the cor­ners of the space from the floor to the ceil­ing, four high def­i­ni­tion pro­jec­tors, four HD me­dia play­ers and four ac­tive speak­ers, paced be­hind the screens.