Webster, described as a multidisciplinary artist and creative technologist working at the nexus of sculpture, installation and experience, is at his Melbourne studio talking on the phone to Beat about his latest piece, Morphic Prism.
It will be displayed in the shopfront at 184 Gertrude Street, which is one of almost 40 sites that will be home to the Gertrude Street Projection Festival for ten days starting this Friday night. For the ninth year now, The Gertrude Projection Association is transforming this famously hip pocket of Fitzroy into an open-air gallery of sorts. Festival Director Nicky Pastore and Festival Curator Amanda Haskard are presenting a program of new media works, combining projected light, imagery and audio, plus some including performance, in laneways, windows, footpaths and, in the case of Webster, shopfronts as well.
For Morphic Prism, Webster has used three 47-inch LCD screens to create a triangular tunnel.
“It has a two-way transparent mirror on the front and then it has a proper reflective mirror on the back, and anything you put inside that space creates this infinite reflection tunnel,” says Webster. “It’s not necessarily infinite but it multiplies the reflection back and forth, and I hadn’t seen anyone do it with video before. I’ve only seen it with lights. Then, using a suite of different textures and geometries, which have different styles, pace and colour, images are played on a loop, giving this abandoned atelier a mesmerising new lease on life.
He discovered his love of new media almost by accident. It was the opportunity to take some visual art electives while studying sound art at RMIT, that caused him to “defect” to video.
“I moved to Korea and lived there for a year and during that time I spent a lot of time surfing the internet and discovered this whole world of new media arts, which is happening in Europe, and it was mainly using projection over installation and forms and through mesh and these more immersive environments and that really just captured my imagination,” he says. “There was something about that whole immersive sensory experience I found really fascinating. I’ve always been interested in that kind of thing, spectacle and light, and how that affects us cognitively, and consciousness, and the effects that has on our senses.
“I’m particularly interested in the way digital and physical forms are emerging and creating hybridisations. There’s this kind of morphing of dimensional planes, from 3D to 2D, and it kind of creates this 2.5D dimension. It’s like this inter-dimension and this dimensional shifting. I find it interesting there’s the mental dimension as well and how these different areas can co-exist and potentially how these different dimensions combine and interact,” he says.
With the rapid evolution of technology and the possibilities things like virtual reality hold for the future of human experience, plus yet-to-be realised concepts (will we eventually be uploading our minds to digital formats?) Webster says Morphic Prism is an attempt to create a work that touches on these ideas.
“Not technically, scientifically as complicated as that, it’s more of an aesthetic representation of what’s happening, and getting into the quantum world as well, and trying to visualise these dimensions”.
BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD
