Portal is a multi media installation and was exhibited in the “Sound, Performance, Visual Arts” exhibition, University of Brighton, Grand parade Campus, 26 Feb – 3 March 2005. Portal re creates a visual phenomena which occurs when rain gather as bulbous water droplets upon a window pane, breifly, before joining the streams of water gushing down the glass. Each droplet momentarily becomes a watery lens containing an inverted image of the passing world, each reflecting the whole scene but each slightly distorted and unique.
Water droplet
Water Droplet
The droplets, each with their unique slightly distorted images of the passing world give some sort of insight into the theories of parallel universes and the multiverse, where our universe is not the only one but just one of countless universes, all slightly different. Also the way in which the water flows down the window pain, one minute a stream, then forming individual droplets, then a stream, then to a river, then the sea, then water vapour and so on in a never ending cycle, may give some insight into how matter in the universe flows from one manifestation to the next. As ovid said,
“Nothing keeps its own form, and nature the renewer of things refreshes one shape from another. Believe me, nothing dies in the universe as a whole, but it varies and changes its aspect, and what we call being born is a beginning to be of something other than what it was before, and dying is likewise ending a former state.”
I filmed the footage for Portal upon various train journeys. This passing landscape reflects the way in which water flows as at times, one may focus upon individual objects but at other points the image is just a blur with no focal point. The sound is the electromagnetic activity recorded aboard the train journeys as the footage was filmed. This electromagnetic activity is an ever present layer of sound but is not audible until picked up with an electromagnetic pick up microphone. Again, this electromagnetic activity is reflective of the flow of water or matter in the universe, an ever present flow only manifesting itself through the closing of a switch. The footage is presented in the installation space with a perspex pane in front of multiple monitor screens, water dripping down the pane with magnification in place to intensify the experience for the viewer.