Work that I should have posted before.... "Wearing this distorted space"

In 2005 I created this mock-up piece for the "Digital Perceptions" exhibition at the Collins Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. What I wanted to be able to do was create an engineered print in a jacket that was part of a fabric wall.

In 2007, I continued the idea for the "New Craft Future Voices" conference in Dundee to create the piece called "Wearing this distorted space". I first took photographs of the gallery space where I would be displaying the work. Then I used the photos as a backdrop for the imagery that I was creating to fill into the jacket, so that it would create a trompe l'oiel effect when exhibited. When I installed the piece, I created two planes of fabric that were stretched into a cove in the Cooper Gallery. The photo below shows the background panel which was not actually visible once the entire work was installed. I used one of the photos of the gallery and distorted it, leaving in some random artwork and a table as part of the image.

Then I installed another panel in front of the previous one, concealing it completely. The front panel had the jacket integrated into the composition so that the imagery continues across all of the seamlines. Below is a shot during the installation process.

Here's a detail of the jacket.

This shows the 'floatiing' composition that I hung in the middle of my re-representation of the gallery.

Once it was completely installed, I used two digital cameras and two LCD projectors to create the final effect with the piece. One camera was capturing live imagery from the front panel and projecting it onto a section of the back panel. Another camera was capturing what was being projected onto the back panel and re-projecting it out onto an adjacent wall in front of the piece.

When a person would try on the garment, at first they would think that they are just seeing a projected image of themselves on the adjacent wall, but if they looked closely, they would realise that the projection on the wall did not match the imagery of the fabric panel they were in (it had the table, etc. from the back panel as well). In this way, I was trying to communicate the connection and disconnection that we have to our environments when we aren't clear about what we want from digital technologies.