What Comes Around Goes Around

The barrel mover is a technological element in an art piece by Jeff Shore of Houston, Texas, and Jon Fisher. It first showed at the Galveston Arts Center, Galveston, Texas from September 8 through October 7, 2001. Below is an excerpt from "It Takes Two to Techno" by Alexandra Irvine.

The latest multimedia installation to be created by Houston artist Jeff Shore, What goes around comes around, is the culmination of across-country, collaborative project many years in the making. Calling upon the technical expertise of Chicago-based composer/computer programmer Jon Fisher, Shore challenged his friend to devise specific electronic and instrumental components he had envisioned as integral to his installation. As it happened, Shore's timing was perfect. This project became the springboard to introduce the research into motion control and robotics on which Fisher and colleague Ed Bennett had been working for the past two years in the Department of Art and Technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In What comes around goes around, the artist uses common materials and unrefined construction to disguise what is actually extremely sophisticated technology. The installation is divided into three parts. First, a room of sculptural objects-actually decoy sculptures used to house the complicated technological devices that dictate the operation of the installation. While interesting in their own right, these implements are the necessary byproduct of the core of the work. Rather than hide them behind a wall or curtain, Shore presents them as works of art that the uninitiated might perceive as the focus of the installation.

Next is a wall-dependent grouping of three-dimensional works strung together by a network of wires attached to the wall line drawings. These components are computer-automated gongs; electro-acoustic instruments designed by Fisher to provide musical interludes for the installation. Visible only in silhouette, the instruments are backlit in response to remote activity (or lack thereof). Shore's tinkerings would not be complete without the inclusion of sound, as each piece is an aural as well as a physical experience.

The grand finale is the heart of the operation, so to speak-a darkened space where participants are offered a chair and a panel of buttons, but given no instruction. However, progenies of the age of "Asteroids" will instinctively know what to do. Manipulation of the controls allows the participant to guide a small video camera across a topological landscape created by Shore. As the landscape is viewed from the video screen only, all sense of reference and relative size is lost. Fisher and Bennett have contributed the motion control technology that allows this installation to seemingly operate as an ultra low-tech video game. "Because we are using a type of motorcontroller that is typically used in the robotics industry, the computer is able to 'know' at any given moment exactly where the camera is on the surface of the landscape." Fisher explained. "This in turn reacts to the user's 'driving' commands, and the computer is able to designate certain areas as special targets that trigger new events when discovered."

Documentary video of the installation can be found on the moving pictures page.