SwanQuake:House
2007 installation: digital wall print, customised furniture, computer game environment, 5.1 channel sound, installation view Barbican Art Gallery, London
The Swan Quake project is concerned with the quest for self-identity in an immersive constructed environment. Here the artist plays herself as a troupe of ghostly avatars — the narratives of dance playing out in a series of interlinked void spaces. The general themes are the body, architecture, urban landscape and revealing & concealing. Loops are used here as a motif for the entrapping behaviours associated with compulsion, obsession and anxiety.
“SwanQuake, by British artists igloo (Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson) is an immersive, interactive installation which repurposes video game technology and aesthetics to create a singular universe which is at once hermetic and free.
Video games are purposeful by nature: there is a goal to be reached, points to be won, opponents to be slain. Subverting this expectation at its most fundamental level, the point of SwanQuake is that there is no point or perhaps that the only purpose is that of experience alone. And in this way, the work presents a meticulously rendered, fully navigable world whose constituent parts-the ‘protagonists of rooms, stairs, doors, windows, an outside and an inside-may at some other time provide fertile and meaning-laden ground for the battles, victories, losses of a traditional video game, but now stand silent.
Something has happened, undoubtedly: deep beneath the building around which the installation is based, a burnt-out tube train rests off twisted tracks. But whatever it is that has happened, happens no more. It is a virtual set, re-animated. Where figures appear-in the form of dancers-their presence elicits a certain calm: there is life yet in this universe, and moreover there is no mandate to kill or maim.
As much as it interrogates the experience of gaming and video games, SwanQuake is about space itself. It uses the devices of video games, and the powerful position of the first-person gaming experience, navigating the world ‘naturally’, to engage with spaces both homely and unhomely; the security of a domestic geometry understood jarring suddenly with monstrosities akin to Borges’ Tión, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. And it is this exploration of space, as though a question or challenge which might be posed on a larger scale in other ‘virtual worlds’, which most effectively deconstructs the mechanics of the video game, demanding a shift from acting to looking and from goal-centred behaviour to something altogether more contemplative.”
Catalogue Essay by Alona Pardo for the Barbican’s ‘Watch-Me-Move’ exhibition 2011-15
SwanQuake is accompanied by a publication: SwanQuake: the User Manual
Concept: Gibson/Martelli
Performers: Antonia Brett, Ruth Gibson, Joanne Fong, Julia Griffin
Motion Capture Choreographers: Ruth Gibson, John McCormick
Unreal developer: Bruno Martelli
Additional Programmers: John McCormick, Rachel Cordone (Angel Mapper)
Motion capture avatar designers: Bruno Martelli, Alex Jevremovic, Marshall White
Music & sound: Adam Nash
Customised furniture: Greg Cox
Motion Capture Studio: Motek – Oshri Evan Zohar, Jasper Brekelmans & Nathan Ornick