Jason Rhoades (b. 1965, USA)
Perfect World, 1999

To be totally honest, the look of it – from the images I could find – does not make me too excited. I hope, I would find a way to appreciate it if encountering it IRL (although I doubt it). But I do like the conceptual side of it. An installation in a scale and composition that does not offer any particular point of view, but rather inescapable multiplicity of viewing points and perspectives, none of them permitting full overview of the work. I like that feature both as emphasis on multiple perceptions and interpretations of the work and as a metaphor for human condition and impossibility of universal truth at large.

I haven’t had a chance to build large scale installations so far myself, but several of my experiments are toying with similar ideas – e.g. by superimposing or combining sounds and/or photographs from different times and places that would never be perceptible from a single position IRL (as in “Street Stretch” – a 5 m long collage of photographs of the same stretch of the street taken with few seconds interval), or by choosing size and format of pdf-files or prints that deny single point with full overview (as in “Rererepresentations” – a pdf piece where full overview makes contents unintelligible, while readable view requires manual manipulation to navigate the page), forcing the viewer to move around and experience series of fragmentary views. It’s all very crude at this point still, but it is exploration in progress.