Tuesday, 19 February 2013

TONY OURSLER: INFLUENCE MACHINE @ TATE MODERN


For a few evenings over the weekend Tony Oursler's Influence Machine was being projected over Bankside from the Tate Modern Gardens. There were various videos projected on the Tate itself, and other smaller projections shone onto trees and through dry ice. At first the smaller projections seemed really inconspicuous, and it took a while for me and my friend to actually find them. After finding a few and realising that we hadn't got the wrong date, I actually really liked this aspect of them. The viewer could walk around and find various images, some more obvious than others. I loved the different textures the images were shone onto: the dry ice, tree bark, leaves and bricks. It added another dimension to the videos. One of my favourites was the video projected on a tree (top right image). The man's head would occasionally jerk forward a few times in time with a loud knocking sound. The way the image fitted perfectly onto the tree made it seem as though he was knocking his head against the bark itself. I loved the site specificity of that one in particular.