MAZED

Mazed was created for the exhibition: Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, J. Paul Getty Museum, November 13, 2001 to February 3, 2002. Commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Research Institute in 2001, (http://www.getty.edu/news/press/exhibit/devices.html), Mazed was part of the Devices show that juxtaposed historical viewing devices (i.e. camera obscuras, zoetropes, etc.) with the work of contemporary artists exploring technologies of seeing.

Mazed is a computer animation that displays a continuous tangle—or a maze—of disorienting, layered imagery that continually implicates the viewer in the animation in the form of imagery grabbed from an existing surveillance camera network. Viewers thus become part of the stream of transforming imagery. Camera data is integrated into the animation instantly. Hundreds of visitors are trapped, if only for a fraction of a second, in the machine.

The computer begins to replace traces of the live gallery interiors with alternately sized views of spaces outside the museum that are devoid of human presence. In other words, the imagery changes from highly site-specific time-stamped imagery to more general imagery. The image collage shuffles again and again to compose a grid-like array of bricks. The sequence ends as the computer runs an automated “Breakout” game. As the ball hits each brick, the image is deleted from the hard drive.

According to co-curator Barbara Stafford, “Holmes’s splintering maze reminds us of the process; that the beholder is always mapped into the instrument and always leaves traces in the system” [1].