Green
Room
Will Pappenheimer, 2004
Green Room consists of an isolated space with up to three projections on
adjacent walls replaying enlarged real-time webcasts from Baghdad during
April 4-7, 2003. The webcasts, which included live sound, were recorded at
night while the US troops were approaching the city. The footage includes
different degrees of darkness and the approaching light of dawn. Green Room
alludes to the waiting room for guests on a TV talk show and the confusing
mix of theatricality and real-time media on the Internet. Waiting also refers
to the city awaiting invasion, or liberation, whichever way it was understood.
Nighttime was also relatively peaceful, but ominous nevertheless. As observers
on the other side of the earth, we experience the sights, sounds and looming
danger of the city in the small uneventful hours of night. We have little
idea of what will come to pass in the hours and days ahead.
Like
many webcams, the audience is mesmerized by distance, the slow repetition of
frames and open-ended time, waiting for some expected spectacle. The real-time
of webcams is explored here as anti-narrative, or as a non-narrative into which
the audience inserts their own narrative. This aspect of the medium calls to
mind John Cage’s directives to obliterate the identified subject or Fluxus
interest in suber-bordom, designating “events in events”, encouraging
the collapse of "art time into real-time." In the context of war
and surveillance it functions as the simultaneous desire, loss and fear of
being present. Yet allows the receiver distance and safety. Subtextual narratives
are competing for primacy, the supposed supremacy of American technology that
allows for the broadcast and is the expected endgame, and the uncannily familiar
unsignified view of uneventful time, which proceeds through the night anywhere
in the globe.
One
of the important intentions of the installation is to approach a state of telepresence.
The installation includes 5.1 surround sound audio, a heater maintaining the
temperature 80-82 degrees, and a humidifier maintaining 27-35% humidity. The
scientific, technological, and philosophical questions connected to this goal
are meant to be raised. A lime green couch, chair and pillows are included
for comfort and the room is carpeted. The conditions exude comfort and catastrophe.
The installation could be constructed in at variety of levels, depending on supplies
and equipment. There could be as little as one video. The room would need to
be darkened and about 10' x 10' in dimension.
