Interactive work evokes complex memories

By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | August 12, 2005

Memory is no easy thing to depict. Painters try, obscuring images with veils of color. Video artists add sound and time to the mix -- but you're still just looking at a monitor. Petra Gemeinboeck, with the help of Mary Agnes Krell and Craig Dietrich, uses digital and laser technology to powerfully and beautifully evoke the memory of a space -- a memory that is sparked by and comes to include the viewer's presence.

The project, at Studio Soto, is the culmination of a residency the artists held at Do While Studio, a digital art think tank. Gemeinboeck came from Australia to work on the project. Do While and Studio Soto have partnered to offer the residency and exhibit the work, ''Impossible Geographies 01: Memory."

The show comes on the heels of Scott Snibbe's ''Shadow Play" at Art Interactive, in which the viewer could play with his or her own slowed-down or repeated shadow image. Gemeinboeck goes beyond that, embracing the three-dimensional stage of the gallery.

She and her collaborators have threaded the room with a network of laser beams and mounted video projections on two walls. Step into the gallery and you appear, in fuzzy, slightly delayed black and white, in the video. Every laser beam you cross triggers a pattern of already captured images: The picture of you fractures to reveal a wispy video of someone else who has long since left the gallery. A spooky soundtrack of collected sounds from the street, distorted and slowed, adds to the mood.

This, then, is the memory of the room itself, regurgitated back as randomly as memories themselves arise, and with a nebulous beauty. Just as in real life, the images cycle between present and past; the video continually returns to the viewer -- indeed, that image never completely dissolves as the older ones rise up and ebb away. ''Impossible Geographies" enables the viewer to imagine stepping into someone else's swirling psyche and playing a bit part.

Haunting and absorbing though it is, ''Impossible Geographies" could be even more ambitious: The projection on one large wall is nearly impossible to see, and ideally there would be video on all four walls. But these are quibbles. To invoke a poker analogy, Gemeinboeck and company have seen Snibbe and raised him, creating a powerfully absorbing interactive work.