DATE – 1986
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Telepresence robotic installation
STATUS – Displayed simultaneously in Toronto, Canada and Salerno, Italy
Photography artist Graham Smith was born in Vancouver but he works in Toronto. His work in progress includes a Kinetic Time Machine which will photographically record environments over extended periods of time. The art I create is shaped by the environment in which I live. I see technology not as a tool but as a palette: video, robotics and kinetics are simply different colors ready to be mixed into a new work”.
Displaced Perspectives allows viewers to explore distant environments through the video eyes of a remotely controlled robot. It is a teleguidance system which will allow participants in Salerno or Paris to explore a site in Toronto by directing a small video camera mounted on a remotely-controlled robot, which transmits real-time digitized images via the Macintosh computer “MacVision” system.
“This ability to see, and control a machine, across the Atlantic is the most visible part of the piece, yet conceptually it is only a surface element. The true power of the piece lies in it’s definition of communication as an interactive explorative process which results in the construction of a 3-dimensional mental model. The robot uses the same scanning process people use when entering any new space; they look all over and build up a 3-dimensional model from many different perspectives. It is this definition of communication: many small pieces making up something greater than the whole, which lies at the heart of this piece” G. Smith).
