Carolyn Healy and John Phillips at Philadelphia Live Arts Festival

This installation of light and sound overlaid on objects, in a darkened room of an abandoned commercial building, became a kind of model of Plato's cave for our digital age. Visitors to Healy and Phillips's Limbic Pentameter at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, which commissioned the piece, were given a viscerally convincing experience of emerging modes of perception.

Light and images cut across the space at an angle, traveling over and transforming Healy's elegant standing assemblage of wire works, struts and found objects, and landing on two adjacent walls. In the darkness, without the comfort of spatial referents, the effect was literally dizzying: moving projected lines and other forms, intersecting the skeletal framework, created the illusion that the objects were lifting up or twisting to one side. Tumbling purples, neon-blue squiggles, skating dots and cellular blobs all slid in stately progression across the field of view, like thoughts or memories blooming into consciousness before being pushed aside.

The traditional film experience offers immersion in an alternate, heightened reality, while video-enhanced installation and performance work create a fruitful phenomenological tension between the physical and the disembodied image. Limbic Pentameter adroitly called upon both those sources. The culmination of a long, close and consistent collaboration between these two artists, this environmental work effected a breathtaking, disorienting synthesis of physical and virtual imagery, the most completely realized symbiosis of the two that I can remember having seen.

The sound, created along with the projections by Phillips, added another dimension. Elongated roars and fragments of voices gave a sense of atmospheric portent, while syncopated pings, clicks and chirps added a desultory counterpoint. Those more machinelike sounds, along with the somewhat Constructivist geometry of both the sculptural elements and the projected forms, suggested an alternative reading of the work, not just as a model of the mind but as the mind of an intelligent machine. Hardware and software--metal and light and sound--mingled in endlessly surprising ways (though the projections and audio ran on a repeating loop). This fully activated space, with its interpenetrations of substance and light, its Rube Goldberg kinesis and etherealized color, was itself a mysteriously effective apparatus for eavesdropping on the ghost in the machine.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group