Artscape

Window treatments

By Melissa Starker

blog I e-mail

BRYAN BULLOCK PHOTO

Nate Reese, Nathan Ober and Chad Shepherd

The giant, outdoor advertising screens that have sprung up in the city are all within walking distance of the Gay Street home to art spaces Skylab and The Shelf. The newest, fanciest display of them all — wavy strips of scrolling text and graphics at Broad and High — is right around the corner, which got some artists involved with the spaces thinking, why should ads be the only moving images to get such a large, hard-to-ignore canvas?

On Saturday night, those artists will go live with an experiment on a similar scale, entitled 28 Windows. Along with an installation and live sounds inside the building — created by Hugs & Kisses, Envelope, Jacoti Sommes and djtal — every window of 57 E. Gay will be filled with rear projections of short video works from eight different artists, running on a continuous loop. Speakers mounted to the building facade will amplify a synched soundtrack by Chad Shepherd, who'll also perform live that evening. The rest of the block will provide both an unsuspecting audience and an acoustical chamber.

"We did a sound test and it fills the whole street, just bouncing off buildings," said Nate Reese of video collective Leftchannel, who's contributing a piece to the show.

Reese was asked to participate by Nathan Ober, previously seen around town using his leg power to run the P2 bicycle generator. One such instance last summer, in which the generator became part of an installation by Gene Felice II at The Shelf, provided further inspiration for this weekend's event (Felice contributes to 28 Windows as well).

"I thought it would be cool to do the whole building," Ober said. "I got Nate involved and we grabbed artists."

Pulled into the mix was Ryan Agnew, a local multimedia artist known for working in unusual materials (toothpaste, garden hoses, saliva) and presenting his videos outside various hotspots in a van gallery (according to Ober, Agnew's working with nature imagery this time). From Chicago, there are CCAD alumnus Glen Jennings and Todd Kephart, an Ohio University grad. Covering the rest of the windows are Sean Conner, one of Reese's cohorts at Leftchannel, and another local, Toby Waggoner, sure to share pictures from his recent group bike trip to Niagara Falls.

Before the videos were made, Shepherd grabbed a microphone and walked the route he expects the average 28 Windows visitor to take. He then created a base for a unifying soundtrack, something for each video artist to cut to, which he manipulated and layered over in Cool Edit Pro. "I stretched it out to 15 minutes," Shepherd explained. "It changed its form. There's a sound like trumpets and I don't know what it is."

To add a greater sense of cohesion, Ober and Reese came up with a list of 16 literal and abstract "focuses," time-coded cues for each artist to respond to a certain rule or restriction. For example, at a particular time, every video will present movement from left to right. At another point, each artist must include 12 seconds of "massive entropy." (When I mentioned I'd be looking that term up later, Reese said, "Good luck.")

Asked what people can expect from the experience, Ober said, "I don't want to give too much direction. I just envision it, and want to see what happens."

Shepherd added that he wants people "to realize their surroundings, the images and sounds coming to them that are special."

And as they examine these things, those who happen to walk down Gay Street Saturday night should know that they, too, may be under examination. Given that there's likely to be a lot of people seeing 28 Windows who were only expecting the street to provide dinner at Tip Top or Due Amici, the organizers are considering hooking up a camera outside to a monitor indoors, to make viewers part of the show.

May 29, 2008

Copyright ? 2008 Columbus Alive, Inc. All rights reserved.