The New Zealand Film Archive is pleased to present an installation from Auckland-based Digi artist Janine Randerson.

Four round screens hover above the viewer in the installation Peace in Space. The curved planes allow projected light to refract over their surface. The projected images on the screens suggest technologically assisted vision of terrestrial and astral landscapes. The New Zealand Film Archive is pleased to present an installation from Auckland-based Digi artist Janine Randerson.

Four round screens hover above the viewer in the installation Peace in Space. The curved planes allow projected light to refract over their surface. The projected images on the screens suggest technologically assisted vision of terrestrial and astral landscapes.Slow moving forms expand and contract. Peace in Space offers an alternative spatial schema to the flattened cartographic image. The circular screens are Randerson's idea of the galactic equator; the imaginary circle on the sky formed by extending the plane that passes through the centre of the Galaxy. The forms are abstract and brightly coloured, suggesting worlds the human eye could not see without advances in the technologies of vision: satellite images of weather patterns, the surface of planets or matter viewed under a microscope.

The structural development of the piece is determined by audio artist Jason Johnston's sound track, which references a symphony composed by the Russian Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). Scriabin sought to express his synaesthetic condition in his 1910 symphony Prometheus, The Poem of Fire. The performance of Prometheus required not only an orchestra but a clavier a lumieres, which controlled the play of coloured light in the form of beams, clouds, and other shapes, flooding the concert hall. The white light emanating form the colour organ was said to be so strong it was "painful to the eyes."1 The different colour casts and level of activity of the screens relate to different sections of Scriabin's symphony. Not all the screens are active at once, rest periods balance image activity. The viewer may activate elements of the installation themselves.

Science fiction cinema has interrogated space as an unconquered territory for human colonization. For a long time in reality space has been a militarised place. The Outer Space Treaty (1967) bans weapons of mass destruction from space but does not prohibit other weapons. Space is a fragile environment that is becoming full of human debris. This installation is a personal imagining of how the minutiae of miocenes are connected to the vastness of solar systems.

Randerson has collaborated with Oakley Buchmann and Claudia Nelles from the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITLab) at Canterbury University for the realisation of this installation. This project was made with the support of Creative New Zealand

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1. Richard E. Cytowic, Synesthesia: Phenomenology And Neuropsychology A Review of Current Knowledge, 1996, psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html,

Peace in Space
July 15 - August 13 2005

Pelorus Trust Mediagallery
Film Archive Mediaplex, cnr Taranaki & Ghuznee Streets, Wellington

www.hitlabnz.org
www.hitlabnz.org