Place: A User's Manual - Jeffrey Shaw, 1995
The images and spoken texts are digitally stored in a computer. The viewer uses the joystick to control panning in any lateral direction over the surface of these images and zooming in or out of a chosen part of an image. At the zoom extremes the joystick generates a digital transition to a new image - a process experienced by the viewer as breaking through from one image level to another. Most of the images in this work are derived from photographs that were digitised, collaged and electronically processed. Because these images are a digital raster, the action of zooming is also a process of increasing abstraction as the pixels become progressively larger. The different levels of representation induced by this digital deconstruction is a formal and conceptual attribute of this work.
Narrative Landscape (1985/95) is constituted by twenty-eight images which are interrelated by a specific spatial and conceptual architecture. The primary image (a satellite picture of earth inscribed with a Hebraic astrological chart) is divided by a grid of red lines into nine areas which define access to nine groups of three images. The three images in each group are arranged one below the other and the viewer can move up or down through these three levels. He can also go back to the primary image and then choose another image group to zoom into.
All nine groups are structured as an iconographic triptych. The images on the first level represent a place; they have the scale of an aerial image of a city or landscape; the images on the second level indicate the body; they have the scale of human situations; the images on the third level show a figuration of signs that symbolically extend the themes expressed in the first two image levels of place and body. Each group of three images has a distinct narrative formation - the underlying metaphor is one of emblematic places whose typologies are articulated in the fate of its denizens.
The texts of The Narrative Landscape were written by Dirk Groeneveld and are conceived as nine distinct narrative poems interactively linked to the nine groups of three images.
In 1995 a compact CD-ROM version of this work was made. It uses a trackball as the interface and the imagery is shown on a monitor mounted with its screen facing upwards in a specially made table.