Jeffrey Shaw
«The Narrative Landscape»

«In this installation images are projected onto a large screen lying flat on the floor of the exhibition space. The spectators stand on a surrounding balcony where a joystick enables any one of them to interactively operate the work.
The images and spoken texts are digitally stored in a computer. The viewer uses the joystick to control panning in any lateral direction over the surface of these images and zooming in or out of a chosen part of an image. At the zoom extremes the joystick generates a digital transition to a new image—a process experienced by the viewer as breaking through from one image level to another. [...The] action of zooming is also a process of increasing abstraction as the pixels become progressively larger. [...]
The primary image (a satellite picture of earth inscribed with a Hebraic astrological chart) is divided by a grid of red lines into nine areas which define access to nine groups of three images. The three images in each group are arranged one below the orther and the vierwer can move up or down through these three levels.[...]
All nine groups are structured as an iconographic tryptich. The images on the first level represent a place; they have the scale of an aerial image of a city or landscape; the images on the second level indicate the body; the have the scale of human situations; the images on the third level show a figuration of signs that symbolically extend the themes expressed in the first two image levels of place and body. Each group of three images has a distinct narrative formation—the underlying metaphor is one of emblematic places whose typologies are articulated in the fate of their citizens.
The texts were written by Dirk Groeneveld and are conceived as nine distinct narrative poems interactively linked to the nine groups of three images.»

(source: Jeffrey Shaw – a user’s manual. From Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality, Anne Marie Duguet/Heinrich Klotz/Peter Weibel (eds.), Ostfildern 1997, pp. 106f.)