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DIGITAL BEING ...Joey Morgan, an LA-based installation artist, uses ambient sound, poetic narration, projections, video, text and image collage to create encompassing narrative spaces. In the past she has also used public spaces, such as window storefronts, cinema lobbies, and telephone answering machines, to involve interactive response. Morgan’s public spaces become intensely private and the private spaces strangely public. In one recent work, The Man Who Waits, we watch and listen as a woman talks in a rapid, hushed voice about how she must sit and watch a man in a sleep disorder clinic, electrodes strapped to his head and body. We see a video of the subject, asleep or trying to sleep we cannot know. And yet interspersed within the narrative we also hear his voice, the subject of the gaze, recount a series of powerful dreams. In the gallery space, literal representations of his dream work are projected on the walls. Morgan punctuates his narrative with picture-in-picture jump cuts that map exactly to his narration. Morgan makes ambience intense. Her narrative is, on the one hand, dreamlike and free flowing but on the other hand it is also inexorable and relentless. The sleeping dream world contains within it historical connection, necessity, and social imperative; reality comes from analyzing the bits. The man who waits has electrodes taped to his head. Technology has implanted itself into his dreams and we wonder whether our privileged view of his sleeping revelations carry with them a responsibility... |