Inward Panorama
Dimensions Variable
12 min. loop
Vacuum Cleaner, Laundry Basket, Pizza Box, Mirror, Transducers, Wire, Projector, Fog Machine, Monitor, Brightsign Media Players
2023
In the media installation Inward Panorama, I took the traditional form of the Panorama, the all-over 360 degree image housed in its own building, and I invert the gaze toward the self. Rather than depicting a historic place or a cultural event, Inward Panorama illuminates my mental processes as a room-size audio visual sculptural construction.
The audience enters a large foggy chamber containing a wall-filling video projection of colorful static, recreating sight and inner-eyelid hallucinations, and four dramatically lit domestic objects that emit sound. These objects represent elements of the self: the self fulfilling ego, a pleasure seeking ID, a neurotic energizer, and a narcissistic reflector. Each sculpture behaves like an actor, who speaks through my use of transducers, devices that transmit sounds by vibrating hollow objects. With this technology, I install my own voice into each commonplace object, to create character nodes in a symbolic network of mental activity composed of audio and power cables. Through exposing the wires and electronics that facilitate the work, the presentation of Inward Panorama self-reflexively draws attention to its own construction, defamiliarizing itself and the objects within, while simultaneously immersing the viewer with its all-over use of media and the cerebral cacophonic sound.

In their narrative dialogue, the object-characters reenact my neurotic internal dialogues while I am trying to fall asleep. The piece has no beginning or end, with the audio looping continuously, giving the sensation of insomnia. There is no exit for the conscious mental apparatus. The basis of the work was inspired by three mid-century existentialist and absurdist plays: Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett, Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. The liminal settings in these works (the purgatory living room, the stage production, the side of the road) are referenced in the staging of Inward Panorama through the treatment of the space and the selection of objects. I am revisiting these works now in order to speak to our present condition, contemplating the existential anxieties surrounding the future of work and income in relation to rapid advancements in technology, the navigation of work and leisure in a time of work-from-anywhere ness, and the schizophrenic nature of attention in relation to digital technologies.
In its varied use of media, Inward Panorama is not quite a play, nor is it a film, or sculpture as it has traditionally been defined. It is a specialized and hybridized media installation, drawing on contemporary and historic art forms. Through the imitation of my subjective experience, I hope the audience experiences a work that is relatable, humorous, and pushes them to reconsider the nature of their experience immersed in the real world.