Statement of Intent: what's this project about?
	There's a quote that I once read that I repeat to myself sometimes, and I think it was said by Socrates. "See things steady and see them whole." I love this quote because it sounds so simple, but it's really lofty and impossible. And we embody this contradiction. We aspire to steadiness and wholeness yet our attention is disjunct and discontinuous. Our associative intelligence, our flexible capacities in conversation and our manual dexterity are all examples of our tendency towards endlessly separating elements and recombining them. The exhortation to see things steady and see them whole speaks to an eternal struggle with constant dis-integration and transience, of our environments and of ourselves. These are the themes of my work. In each of my installations I've created mirroring representations of spaces, each one partial, each one an echo of the other; the room in which the viewer stands, the room within the monitor, the room that is the base which supports the monitor. And in each of my installations there are characters within the monitor, each character a fragment, each a bit of a self. Each bit of a self has a collaged voice, speaking parts of statements also spoken by other characters, although each voice is unique to its character. The voice gives each fragment of a self some larger meaning, some sense of integration. As the characters overlap their voices may sound together, before they vanish and are replaced by another part of some self, speaking its voice, repeating its claim to a type of momentary certainty. Within the monitor the viewer also sees, intermittently and on demand, an empty panorama of the room in which they are standing. Each time I have reinstalled a version of the work the characters have been transposed into, and the panorama mirrors, images of that particular setting. In other words, the characters and their environment are transients and can reside wherever their computer program and monitor reside. On the wall of the physical room, as well as the room within the monitor and on the base, is a line of text, a trace of writing uniting the spaces. It reads: "wandering with habits for territory and sight lines of holding ground and looking out and walking off habits for attention for territory and sight lines to maintain familiar obstructions or unintentional meanderings for constancy for action from the strong suggestion to fit in and know our place for territory and sight lines out of habit out of humor and we stammer and we wander," and it repeats around the three walls of the room. Creating an interactive installation is like staging a small theatrical laboratory experiment. I cast the computer in the role of metaphorical controller and container for parts of ourselves we may want to deny or exile to the dimension of the virtual, to the mirroring space within the screen. I began to wonder about the role of the spectator and of the relationship between the spectator and the work of computer-controlled art. What is the dialogue of 'interactivity' or of an 'action/reaction' between the spectator and the work of computer-controlled art? It seems to me that it is probably not a dialogue about seeing things steady and seeing them whole. It is somewhat the opposite. The spectator encounters the work of computer-controlled art to gaze upon disjuncture and dis-integration, to reach into it, step into it, and to see whether or not the computer responds, whether or not it gazes back in confirmation.
by debrah malater School of Visual Arts Graduate Computer Art Class of 1998 Carolee Schneemann, Thesis Advisor Ken Feingold, Thesis Group Leader