i45, a gallery collective spanning Inman Park, the Old 4th Ward, and L5P, is hosting Convergent Frequencies this weekend from 6-midnight on the corner of Krog and Irvin. Three local artists have worked together to transform a site installation of shipping containers into a trifecta of modern art. The site will feature Matt Haffner’s narrative portraits and Nat Slaughter’s sound installations inspired by the surrounding neighborhood. However, we are most excited about seeing Matt Gilbert’s film piece, Selective Disturbance. Here is what Matt has to say about it:
Selective Disturbance is a site-specific video piece with live musical performance inspired by the modularity of the brain’s vision system and the similar separation of color and movement in digital video.
In digital broadcast television, color data and movement data are sent separately to save bandwidth. Bizarre and by now familiar glitches occur when color data is lost and the movement of one shot is combined with the color of the previous shot.
Visual cognition is similarly specialized; not only does the brain have specific regions devoted to color and movement, but shape, facial recognition, facial expressions, distance… all have specific areas of the brain devoted to them. We know this because if a “selective disturbance” occurs, such as localized brain damage, a person can lose the ability to understand movement, or facial expressions, or some other very specific task.
It would seem that our visual cognitive system is thoroughly fractured and segmented, yet our conscious experience seems fluid and whole. Digital broadcast tries (and very often fails) to maintain an intelligible image of combined color and motion from separate streams of data. Similarly, the city is filled with people, groups, and institutions working independently, sometimes together and sometimes at odds, yet the city seems to have a distinct identity. We talk about “Atlanta” as if it exists in a consistent, discrete, and identifiable form.
Selective Disturbance splits images of the city and the performers into movement and color, investigates them as independent components, and recombines them into a new video work.
As an added bonus members of Beautiful Little Fools, Book Club, and Oryx and Crake will be performing at dusk each day of the exhibit. Check out this video of Gilbert’s work, and then come check out the free exhibit this weekend!
