At the Freud Museum Brass Art inscribed themselves into the domestic space of Sigmund Freud’s former London home. Using Kinect laser-scanning to capture intimate-scaled performances throughout the rooms, staircase and hallway, the artists have developed a visual response to the notion of the uncanny using strategies of repetition and simultaneous ‘doublings’. Their approach has been to respond to the domestic spaces and the artefacts, and remain open to the unconscious influences that determine their actions, behaviour and movement.
Brass Art’s performances with capture technologies, create an unfixed and constantly evolving form: a direct copy of the original space – a double – but with shifting and unexpected points of view in immeasurable time periods, and their doubles the surprising and submerged occupants of that space.
This pixellated and seemingly fragmented re-imagining of Freud’s house reveals exactly what is there and what is ‘unseen’; the Kinect footage appears to bisect walls and reveal the obverse of the scene. Measuring the space through their bodily presence and a virtual ‘peeling back’ of the architectural layers, Brass Art creates a dynamic exploration of the domestic interior as a site of creativity.
During the sojourn in Freud’s house, ambient audio was captured simultaneously – electroacoustic composer Monty Adkins recorded fleeting and involuntary aspects of performances, and coaxed sounds out of dormant objects. These create a series of sonic thresholds – of being in time (sounds matching actions) and being out of time (collapsing timeframes / multiple voices). Experienced binaurally, this soundscape evokes the intimacy of being in the space itself. Such temporal interplay and its creative potential lie at the heart of Brass Art’s exploration of Freud’s House.
Commissioned by University of Salford’s Commission to Collect Programme.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
