THREE SHORT STORIES
When the viewer enters the installation, he finds himself in a dark room facing a wall with a screen on which he can see a projection. A sound comes from behind the screen. Walking along the side wall of the installation, the viewer can enter the projection area where the microfiche viewer projects the microfiche images into a cone. At the end of the cone is the focal point of the back-projection screen. The screen can only be filled with one image at a time, but the projection of the surrounding images continues along the walls of the cone. The viewer is surrounded by images and sound. Two stereo loudspeakers are hidden in the wall at ear level to the left and right of the viewer/operator. The viewer can explore the microfiche by moving the tray that holds the microfiche. The images begin to move before your eyes. Three short stories are the source of the images and the sound. The three films were shot in a small fishing village in Hamburg on the River Elbe. I invented a system for film scores that allowed me to construct three stories that all take place at exactly the same time in seemingly different places, but overlap at certain points. The system provides a series of locations where the scenes take place. The plot of each film travels through the same number of locations for the same amount of time. Because of the system, some of the locations in "Story 1" appear in "Story 2" at one point and in "Story 3" at another. The system allows for the story to travel back in time. The same location can be in the present in one story and in the past in another (flashback times mixe with present time). These recurring locations are filmed and sound recorded from different perspectives and out of different viewpoints.For the microfiche, I selected the same number of stills from each of the three films. The stills represent the scenes in the film. Each scene is represented by 7-15 stills. The stills are arranged in such a way that the viewer is likely to find them or come across them when browsing the microfiche. The person operating the microfiche 'edits' his individual versions of the films, live to the sound surrounding him. In this piece, the sound tells the stories. It locates the viewer aurally in the scenes, and the viewer can edit the images to the sound. The sound tells you whether you are close to objects/people, whether the story is drifting into a flashback or coming out of it, whether there is a pan from left to right, whether you are leaving one room to enter another, etc. The sound is designed to juxtapose space and time, objects and people that are visible in the surrounding images. The sound has been manipulated and mixed to suggest the existence of other scenes taking place at the same time. In film 1, we would hear an off-screen action that belongs to a scene in films 2 or 3, and vice versa, depicting the locations that happen to be close to each other, e.g. a piano song that we hear in soundtrack 1 as it is being played in the room where the actual piano is located. In the corresponding scene of the other film/sound track 2, we are in a garden where someone is preparing a dinner table. We hear the same piece of music, but further away, perhaps only through the left speaker, mixed with close-up sounds of plates and cutlery being moved around. In the corresponding scene on the third soundtrack, we might be in a room with a grandfather clock facing the garden, with the windows open. You can hear the ticking of the clock with the sounds of the garden and the sound of the piano from another room above.