Page 70 - Studio International - September October 1975

PRESENT CONTINUOUS PASTS 1974

The mirrors reflect present time. The reflection of the viewer.) An infinite feeds back into and influences his
video camera tapes what is immediately regress of time continuums (always present behaviour, experiences himself
in front of it and the entire reflection separated by eight second intervals) as being within an extended present-time
on the opposite mirrored wall. The within time continuums is created. joining his immediate-past and his
mirrored wall reflects a view of The mirror at right-angles to the other projected future behaviour. Where the
everything present in the enclosed space. mirror wall and to the monitor wall gives mirror psychologically fixes self-
The image seen by the camera a present-time view of the situation as if perception on an external 'ego',
(reflecting everything in the room) observed from an 'objective' vantage alienated from private consciousness and
appears eight seconds later on the video exterior to the viewer's subjective actual (experienced) behaviour, video
monitor (via a tape delay placed experience and to the mechanism of feedback merges interior mental space
between one video recorder which is feedback between monitor and opposing (intention) with publically observable
recording and a second video recorder mirror walls which creates the piece's behaviour.
which is playing the recording back.) perceptual effect. The optics and psychology of the
If a viewer's body does not directly In architecture a mirror functions in a mirror image as opposed to those of
obscure the lens' view of the facing space tautologically, externalizing it video feed-back are at once dialectically
mirror, the camera is taping the through reiteration of the six rectilinear separate and interdependent in the
reflection of the room and the reflected enclosing wall surfaces, emptying the structure of Present Continuous Pasts. An
image of the monitor (which shows the central space of specific, temporally observer facing the monitor sees on
time recorded eight seconds previously evolving meaning. The architectural (or video the durational flow of his past
reflected from the mirror). A person social) signification is eternalised, while behaviour(s). Facing the wall opposite the
viewing the monitor views both the time is isolated as an instant without monitor he sees, simultaneously, the
image of himself eight seconds ago and duration. The mirror defines a person mirror's static present-time view, and
what was reflected on the mirror from psychologically as a fixed image. His 'ego' superimposed onto that image, the video
the monitor eight seconds ago of himself is reflected in the outer, two-dimensional of past processes connecting with his
sixteen seconds in the past (as the surface seen as if viewed by another perceptual present. Finally, the second
camera view of eight seconds prior was (or hypothetical 'other') 'ego'. By mirror wall simply reflects mirror, static,
playing back on the monitor eight contrast, an observer seeing his external present-time.
seconds ago and this was reflected on the behaviour immediately played back on a
mirror along with the then present video monitor so that his perception of it

Installation at Projekt 74, June/September 1974 Installation at John Gibson Gallery, N.Y.,
May 1975
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