The formal component of "3x3" is an experiment in home-made media facades. By assembling nine lap-top computers in an array, we turned the north face of McKinley Gould Library into a three story screen after dark.
"3x3" was also a performance, displaying four distinct works specially formatted to the array. Three of these were abstract color sequences, using each of the laptops in the three by three grid as a pixel. One was a segment of the film by Alejandro Jodorowsky, "Holy Mountain", which we parsed into nine segments. Each laptop was then programmed to run at the same time, so the nine pieces moved in a synchronized fashion.
The piece displays an irony. While the array is meant to act as one unit, the idiosyncrasies of each lap-top in the performance continued to assert themselves. Even when time-synchronized and programmed, each piece of technology had its own timing in displaying the videos. The array works more as an unruly chorus than a lock-step machine.
"3x3" capitalized on the pre-existing window-grid of the Library, but it also demanded a re-appraisal of the North side of the library building, which is not widely visited. Locating a media performance in this space gave us a reason to view the architecture at a novel time and angle. In this way the performance gestures beyond the artistic content displayed toward the activity of students. One begins to look through the windows with eyes primed for viewing art.
There's both a complementarity and a tension between the focus we've drawn to the lap-tops and the Library. Libraries provide resources in long aisles and quiet places to study; laptop computers store information and allow users to efficiently manipulate data. On the one hand, the screens display the results of series of computational tasks and, in a sense, mirror the productive efforts of students who are also transforming data. On the other hand, introducing these glitchy digital components into a space that has been paradigmatically analogue recalls the justifiable ambivalence we might feel at the progress of the information age.
