Liz Pickard
Museum of the Mind
APRIL 11- APRIL 25

Website: www.networksfestival.org

In conjunction with Networks, RCA Visual's first annual NEW MEDIA FESTIVAL CURATED BY ANDREA COOPER

In the gallery during the networks festival will be an installation/performance piece by interdisciplinary artist Liz Pickard. Further information about the festival to be announced.

Liz Pickard
Museum of the Mind

The Installation
The year is 4,037. It is the Age of Plastic, a time when advanced technology rules all aspects of human life. The earth has long been encased in Lucite and human beings are the only creatures upon it. The Museum of the Mind is the research outpost of a lone anthropologist who searches her own anthropological memories (i.e. cellular memory, ancestral memory) for artifacts to help unlock the mysteries of the past. The exhibits that appear throughout the Museum of the Mind are examples of the results of her research. These artifacts are interpreted through her perspective two thousand years in the future.

The installation is made of up three separate "spaces" and several exhibits. The spaces will be created by hanging layers of plastic and other materials from the ceiling. Images and light will be projected on the material to create visions of memory – both elemental and personal. In one space viewers are surrounded by projected elemental imagery while the sound-scape is designed to create a meditative state. Another room contains a computer monitor where the viewer is invited to leave a record of their own memories and perform virtual rituals. Another space is made from very large negative images, lit from behind to create a negative forest. The sound-score for the negative forest is ominous, designed for maximum creepy effect. There are several exhibits displaying artifacts frozen in the plastic and fossil exhibits of everyday plants and creatures . There is a viewing device where one can see their own eyes looking back through the face of an animal and a cave exhibit where animals sleep or perform peaceful activities on various TV monitors. The installation will be lit only by projection and video monitors. All the various sound pieces will merge in the space, becoming isolated pieces when the viewer enters the various chambers.

The Performance Piece

The 45-minute performance piece takes place inside a large chamber created from hung projection material to form a circular structure. The audience is introduced to the anthropologist who has created the Museum. The room becomes her "brain projector" a technologically advanced device, which plays her memories in an environmental surround, essentially a pseudo virtual experience. The structure is also a very effective time machine.

Set in the year 4,036 The Museum of the Mind Performance Piece is a commentary on the merging of the human race with it's own technology. It is also the story of one person's search for what has been lost along the way. In this future sci-fi reality, all life save human beings has been erased from the planet, replaced by a perfectly controlled plastic culture. Humans have complete dominion over the physical world including their physical bodies and live peaceful lives of carefully programmed leisure.

In a laboratory on the edges of cyber reality a lone and slightly mad anthropologist continues with her work. The anthropologist of the future explores a different kind of territory altogether. In the Museum of the Mind artifacts have been retrieved from the anthropologist's own cellular memory - the memory of generations and ancestors - and then interpreted through the lens of her future culture and paradigm.

Using live action, multiple projection images, FLASH Animation, video and data projection and sound-score the performance will take the audience on a virtual journey into memory.