The Magic Shield

TITLE : The Magic Shield
DATE : 2005
Installation with automation and video projection
REALISATION : Artist's residency : Oboro, New Media Lab, Montreal and Avatar, centre for the creation and distribution of sound and electronic work, Québec
MATERIAL : 3 futon-frame-beds, motors, selected objects, aluminum, wood, halogen lamp, MIDI controller, computer
DIMENSIONS :each bed : about 250 cm X 180 cm X 120 cm
PHOTO & VIDEO : Diane Landry

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2008
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2006

2005
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- Musée d'art de Joliette (Quebec).
- Horace, Sherbrooke (Quebec).
- Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George (British Colombia).
- lors Espace bidules, présentée par Folie/Culture, codiffusion Avatar
Musée de la civilisation, Quebec city.
- Oboro, Montreal (Quebec).
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In the work The Magic Shield, I try to go further in mobilizing the mind through an approach that Eisenstein called “intellectual montage,” i.e., “… where a new idea emerges from a sequence of shots and where the new idea is not originally found in any of the individual shots.” In this work, the different elements exploit the contrast between what we perceive on the surface of things and what we may discover lurking beneath. Many living screens are offered, unlike the single screen of a typical film. We are invited to enter and cross to the other side of the looking glass. By evoking different readings of the same object, and thus provoking tension between them, I wish to go beyond the protective barrier of memory association. This is my first conscious attempt at such an endeavour, which uses the intellectual dimension and not merely the dimensions of space and time.

This project is composed of three bed/futon structures, each draped with a white covering. The covering is a huge crumpled sheet of paper, which lies directly on the structures of the different beds. The sheets move about delicately as if each one wished to flee its protective role. Indeed, despite their flimsiness, they serve as protective screens for all kinds of mechanical paraphernalia attached to the very structure of the beds. Under the rib cage of the first bed/futon are some 200 discarded personal keys. This prairie of keys will sometimes stir and metamorphose into a set of chimes. In the innards of the second one are fourteen encyclopedia volumes. These books are moved around by a simple mechanism and create the illusion that two bodies are tossing and turning under the weight of the paper. With the third bed/futon, a large motor drives a cam that makes the whole structure alternate its appearance-from bed to sofa and back again. Underneath this to and fro is a network of ligament-like strings, some taut and some loose, moving in tandem with the moving wings of the bed. The rising and falling gives the paper bedcovers an eerie look of weightlessness. The three bed/futons seem to go momentarily from restfulness to wakefulness, from object to event, and from life to death. As Gaby Wood suggests in “Edison's Eve”, in creating motion, we also evoke the concept of eternity and the consequential fragility of humans. “Every time an inventor tries to simulate life mechanically, he is in fact accentuating his own mortality. He holds his creation in his hands, and finds, where he expected life, only the lifeless; the closer he comes to attaining his goal, the more impossible it reveals itself to be.”