A pattern of grass

Video (iPhone). Max/MSP/Jitter

A video installation for one or two screens.

Have you laid down on the grass today?

If you are lying on the grass you might hear a cricket. The sound will be a gateway to another way of being in the grass. The sound will appear and disappear, and if you keep your eyes closed you can walk through the grass in rhythm with the insect's noise.

The video installation A pattern of grass by Rees Archibald operates by metonymy, by a continuity of senses. The piece does not function based on metaphor, that is, by using one sense in place of another. This metonymy is the grammar of the work, but what moves this grammar is the sound of the cricket.

Instead of an insect moving through the world, we experience the world moving through the sound of a cricket. Our perceptions of foreground and background are inverted and then the cricket, the grass, and us, become one thing.

If we understand from a phenomenological point of view that we can be aware of our perceptions of the world, in A pattern of grass the world seems to make us part of its rhythms and pulses.

There is also a technological dimension that presents itself poetically in the flow of what we hear, because the sound of crickets, by its repetition and friction, resembles the sound of data processed in a computer. And the pattern thus presents itself in the logic of sensations between art and life.

** This excerpt is an indicative example and moves between possible states and relationships rather quickly in order to give an overall feeling for the work. As an installed piece everything takes place in a way allowing much more time to be spent with relationships.