greyworld

Rather than showing a finished and looped piece of video work, the Urban Sketches installation makes the space and its inhabitants the subject of the work and its authors.

A hidden camera records the space and its inhabitants the mirror like screen becoming the visual palette for an altered version of the captured reality. The volume of people, their movements and their spatial relationships generate the ‘treatment’ of the final piece. Watch yourself literally melt into the crowd, before bursting into fire and cruising down the street aflame.

Elements of the composition, which are static, can be treated very differently from those that move; moving people can become swarms of flies, with no solidity, whilst fixed or static elements remain solid even when behind a moving crowd.

As the installation moves through its programmed visual experiments, blue plasma streams through talking lips and trails gesticulating hands, people are reduced to ASCII text where cigarette smoke is transformed into strings of text and people appear to burst into flame.

Urban Sketches has been permanently installed in the SONY flagship store in New York (2001) and in the 360 Degree Gallery in London’s award-winning Sketch bar and restaurant (2003).