4. The Projected Observer

This was a private digital refuge for 6 formative months of my life. I went for walks here before there was any art. I made some galleries and thought, perhaps I should make some art to put in them.

This space contains images, videos, sculptures, and performances spanning the last year of my transition. The theme of these works is the projected observer. In each piece, you see me seeing myself.

Until I transitioned, my practice which I undertook in private was almost exclusively sound. Transition dilated my pupils and I tried in vain to express the feelings in words. The visual works flowed out the paucity of words to contain this new volume of feeling.

This is a story in song which stops, reverses, and collapses time into the illusion of space. It forms one corridor of a mutable biography which overflows and intersects itself, continually failing to satisfactorily explain its nature.

It is also a portal – a third space between my current self and my past selves where we can exist together outside time. In many moments of my life I call out to myself, saying yes it will be just fine. I want to ring a bell so loudly I can hear it across time.

The art and the landscape arose together. My first 3D modeling attempts sit with my most recent ones. The seams from my clumsy exploration are visible everywhere. I flatten myself amid my artifacts– the distortion of audio and video synthesizers, the jumbling of my tits and pearls in transparent polyhedra.

If you want to play it as a game, there are some environmental puzzles which unlock areas in the space. Your number keys will also take you to each significant place. You may leave a comment in the guestbook with a screenshot and describe your associations with the site you photographed.

You materialize in front of a large banyan tree surrounded by a black, slightly metallic structure. An glass and metal shaft runs through the pixellated dirt floor and up into the sky. The sky is a rotating geometric pattern in purples and blues, with transparent clouds slowly moving through it and catching flickering light from the scene.