YEAR: 2009-11 (development), forthcoming 2010/11
ROLE: Artistic Director
FORMAT: Interactive installation with full body interface, dual digital projections, multi-touch sensitive screen surfaces, interactive 3D gaming software, spatial sound & new furniture forms.
WITH: Stuart Lawson (3D Designer), Darren Pack (3D Programming) and consultants Dr. Tony Fry (Professor of Design Futures) Dr. Liz Baker (DPI, Australia).

WHAT: A forthcoming interactive installation investigating the cultural dimensions of sustainability through the lens of 'time'. By recasting time as difference rather than as the mechanical abstraction that we primarily know it as, 'Finitude reflects upon the 'plastic' time that now remains for humanity.

KEY QUOTE: “Time is change, time is finitude. Humans are a finite species. Every decision we make today brings that end closer, or alternatively pushes it further away. Nothing can be neutral”. Tony Fry

OVERVIEW:  Finitude is a touch-sensitive, interactive installation that reflects upon the cultural conditions required to foster and sustain our species’ future – focussing upon re-imagining conceptions of 'time'. Rather than conceiving time as a mechanism that simply counts hours, minutes and seconds – the experience of this work frames time as a finite resource (for those who come after us). In this way it presents time as a plastic medium that we can collectively manipulate, either ‘giving to’ or ‘taking it away from’ the future.

TIME AND ITS DIMENSIONS: Time has many dimensions and meanings for us all - life-time, generational time, biological time or work and play time.. but the one that undoubtedly predominates and directs Western culture is in reality an artificial abstraction – made visible by the ticking of clocks. This simplistic form of time serves well to organise our descriptions of history and the makeup of our today - but remains a wholly inadequate way to plan our long-term futures.

Every action we make today has some capacity to ‘take away’ or ‘give time back’ to the future. Every action we take right now somehow redesigns the future because it fills it with residues -  (on the upside the development of culture and knowledge for example, but on the downside the long term affects of persistent waste or depleted stocks of necessary resources). And so as our lives become ever more focussed and propelled by mechanical ‘now time’, we risk ignoring the most critical of all times  - that which has become a finite resource -  time as ‘finitude’.

PHYSICAL APPROACH: The work is set within a darkened space. Audiences approach a 1.5m diameter semi-transparent Perspex circular table (called the ‘LENS’) upon which falls projected three-dimensional imagery. Above this table hangs a paper screen composed of numerous moving elements (called ‘FINITE TIME’). Below the table are four cushioned trolleys that slide on simple wooden tracks.

Whilst the work can be viewed by many from this vantage point, up to four participants at anyone time are invited to lie down on cushioned trolleys and slide themselves wholly under the table, thereby locating their heads (and thus their viewing points) in close proximity to the semi-transparent screen above them. This also allows them to reach the underneath of the screen which is touch sensitive, and through this actively embodied position they can then use their hand, arm and shoulder movements to activate the work. Above the table, and at times clearly visible through the semi-transparent table, hangs a second, more physically complex screen made entirely of folded origami elements (called ‘OUR ENDING’). Each of these coordinated paper screen elements is able to rise or fall under the control of a network of miniature, controllable motors whilst also functioning as a further, complex projection screen.  In this way this screen can literally move closer or draw farther away from the viewers lying beneath it.  Spatial and embodied sound is also played underneath and above the participants, further extending the works embodied and fully spatialised sensation.

The form of the lower, semi-transparent touch screen suggests a lens like form, (the ‘lens of time’ through which the entire work is read and experienced). The form of the upper, moveable screen suggests a complex cellular structure that can retreat or move towards the viewer (the amount of our future time remaining). The ever-changing space between the two screen surfaces represents the void between ‘today’ and end of our species’ bounded time. From both observer and participants perspectives there is also a sense of an ever changing weight (of history) literally pressing down upon vulnerable bodies below – accentuated my the complex layers of image, sound, movement and light.

PARTNERS: The Australia Council for the Arts (InterArts), Arts Queensland, QUT Creative Industries, Mildura Regional Art Gallery and James Cook University.