annette(at)annetteweintraub.com
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“Slide Stories” explores the relationship of underlying structure and external appearance in urban space through a series of intersecting animated images, texts and ambient sound. This project focuses on surface incident as a way of exploring space, using the lens of surface and the play of scale, incidental detail and pattern in urban architecture to embody the larger landscape. As displacement and gentrification erase history and place, difference and memory can be found in residual details.
A series of Giclée print images based on this project is at: Slide Stories images
An original text composed of nine short passages describes an urban space reconstituted in memory, and is interspersed with short extracts from Michael de Certeau's ”The Practice of Everyday Life“ and ”The Production of Space“ by Henri Lefebre. Taken together, the passages are a construction of the city as a fluid mental map of elements that are shuffled and rearranged in memory. The texts explore the changing texture of urban space, perception of movement through the urban environment and the semiotics of space. As each page visually reconfigures the primary text, meaning shifts and narrative arc is altered.
“One Text, Many Stories” was a Spotlight project on Turbulence, http://www.turbulence.org
Hall for dreamers or impersonal machine? Hospital architecture is an amalgam of elements derived from religion, the military and the factory. “Life Support” explores this symbolic coding of space and its underlying mythologies. Four spatial hybrids mixing 2D and 3D representation act as narrative containers for issues of hierarchy, mechanization, privacy and identity. “Life Support” draws upon depictions of medical spaces in advertising, popular culture and film and their reintegration into this vocabulary of space. “Life Support” creates a series of ‘rooms’ based on archetypal hospital spaces: a corridor, waiting room, patient room and treatment room. Each of these locations is associated with a particular psychological state/adaptation response, and explored in moving images paired with short fictions and architectural commentary.
“Life Support” requires Flash and has audio.
Go to the site
... as the mirror changes with the color of its subject, so water alters with the nature of place... In time, and with water, everything changes. Leonardo Da Vinci.
“The Mirror That Changes,“ explores problems of water scarcity and sustainability, bridging personal use and environmental impact. It uses the visual and aural qualities of moving water and waters' characteristic mutability of color, surface tension and reflectivity. Overtly romantic and lyrical representations of water intersect with narratives introducing global issues of water scarcity, purity and equity. Fictional narrative and scientific fact link individual action and global consequence. Commonplace uses of water such as washing clothes, bathing, or drinking find their parallel in the wider forces of nature: rain, ice and flood.
“The Mirror That Changes,“ was commissioned by The Ruschlikon Centre for Global Dialogue, Switzerland.
“Life Support” requires Flash and has audio.
Go to the site
“Mirage” explores the dissonance between the romantic expectations of travel and the realities of place. Based on a journey to Morocco, “Mirage” examines the assumptions underlying leisure travel to an 'exotic' location and the resulting distortion of reality engendered by romantic expectation in a series of narrative episodes. Contradictory narratives exposing a complex of economic, social, historical and psychological realities are embedded in ostensibly neutral 'tourist' photos to challenge conventional readings of touristic convention and explore aspects of voyeurism and escapism. Yet these stories also recognize the resonance of these images, and their lyrical, hypnotic and seductive overtones. “Mirage” examines the tension between expectation and actuality.
“Mirage” was commissioned by CEPA in Buffalo, NY, for the exhibition, "Paradise in Search of a Future."
“Mirage” requires Flash and has audio.
“Crossroads” explores the capacity of film and advertising culture to shape our sense of place. Based on elements of the mythic and actual Times Square/42nd Street, “Crossroads” creates a series of 'pseudo films' constructed from gif images and a mix of ambient sound, audio monologue and animated texts. These little movies incorporate elements of film genres which are closely identified with Times Square, interweaving elements of daily life filtered through the conventions of the noir B-movie, the theater musical and the coming-to-New-York story. “Crossroads” establishes a space in which the familiar architectural and commercial icons of Times Square and 42nd Street are reconfigured mixing personal myth and public space.
“Crossroads” was shown at the International Center of Photography/ICP New Art for Web and Wall, at the Graz Biennial of Media and Architecture, and at International Film Festival Rotterdam.
“Crossroads” requires Flash and has audio.
“Sampling Broadway“ constructs an urban landscape in layered elements of time, history and memory represented as a dense field of typography, signage and image fragments derived from popular culture—the city as media space. “Sampling Broadway“ was inspired by five cross-sections of the city intersecting lower Broadway. Elements of the real, historical and imagined Broadway engage a series of simultaneous visual and textual narratives: the link between nature and the imagined past [Breadth], the invisible archeology of the street [Antecedents], the chaos of traffic and commerce [Pandemonium[, the intrusion of advertising into urban landscape [Hegemony], and the perspective gained from contemplation of the past [Respite].
“Sampling Broadway“ was shown at the 2000 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first Biennial to include Internet work. http://artport.whitney.org/exhibitions/biennial2000/weintraub.shtml
“Sampling Broadway“ was originally designed using QTVR and RealityStudio LivePicture plugins. A portion of the original project is available at the link.
“Pedestrian” evokes the resonance of urban space through the experience of walking, and in an encounter with ordinary objects. A meditation on perception and place, Pedestrian explores the capacity of ordinary objects to trigger reverie. A walk through the City becomes the occasion for a rambling meditation on space, time and human interaction, and the dynamics of street life seen through chance encounter with evocative objects. The Reverie of Space and The Reverie of Objects contain a series of loosely connected urban fictions which move from the social dynamics of eye contact to an appreciation of the elaborate shrines devoted to consumption.
“Pedestrian” received a Silver Award in ID Magazine's Interactive Media Review, 1998.
“Realms” explores the material and metaphysical resonance of urban landscape, evoked via linked images and text in a passage through subterranea, the streets and the rooftops. Moving through a series of brief stories, the viewer explores the dimensions of a mythic city, and participates in a narrative exploring the boundaries of personal an d public space. Embodied in the labyrinth of subway passages, the pulsing energy of the streets, and the altered perspective of the rooftop, the life of the city is revealed in a series of small incidents and unexpected conjunctions. A meditation on the dynamics of urban space, “Realms” takes you on a meandering journey, presenting encounters ranging from the peculiar to the sublime.