Periphery mixes a lo-fi aesthetic with a touch of seedy glamour, fairground-attraction illusion with high technology. It shows you yourself; refracted, distorted, multiplied a hundredfold. But these alternative selves aren’t always quite with you; unreliable and unsettling mimics, they may linger a little longer than they should; glitch, flicker or fade. Sometimes these digital ghosts are joined by others you don’t recognise, traces of movement left by earlier visitors; figures from the past, captured and frozen. They speak – a low babble of voices you didn’t notice at first, fragments of words; questions you can’t quite catch. Try to reply and your words bounce back at you, scrambled and disjointed, a parody of echo.
Periphery explores issues of representation, identity, observation, memory and otherness. It presents fleeting instances, images just caught out of the corner of the eye, words on the tip of the tongue and half-remembered songs. It happens on the very edge of the field of vision and at the threshold of hearing. It forces you to fill in the blanks.
Commissioned by DA2 (The Digital Arts Development Agency) and the Watershed Media Centre (Bristol). Also supported by a Research and Development Grant from the Arts Council of England.
