__Almost__ was an art installation that was performed as a private view in London in 1999. The work led to a collaboration with Union Dance Company called Dance Tech Warriors (DTek).
# Performance
VIMEO 469431205 Video from Almost (1999) installation. Sound is scratched due to damaged CD archive of installation. The video series was based in part on the idea of Painting with light and a love of video projection.
It was essential to the performance that the videos were blown up from the tiny poster size videos that we found on the internet and projected at a cinematic scale, with high quality ambient audio tracks. The work was as much an audio performance as a video installation. The audience was then invited to discuss the work.
Interestingly the audience was unusually mute, which was most likely due to the hypnotic effect of the cyclic video, and the immersive nature of the projection which left you feeling virtually sea-sick. We never got to the discussion we sought.
# Origins of the work
The idea of the project came from previous work in Virtual Theatre, and the internet research I was doing at the time which began to throw up images and in particular videos that had a strange quality - one in which they appeared to be almost real, or rather they raised for the first time the question of whether the images were or were not real. This quality we now term uncanny.
__Almost__ marks the first time the internet early examples of what we know term deepfakes. These first images were not of people, but rather landscapes - they created worlds which were almost believable. Uncanny Worlds. This capability seemed tied to the first iterations of publicly available software that was able to generate photo-realistic fauna.
The aspect of democratic theory that I had been working on prior to this came together for me at least in this installation with regard to the Ministry of Truth and the role of performers in politics. This is my first opportunity to get these ideas on paper so to speak: - Political Actors
# Short Films
Almost 1999: Arts Council funded series of 6 short films, created for large scale video projection, and based on found virtual landscapes.
VIMEO 469431204 Rescued video from damaged archive CDs of Almost (1999) installation. This one is of Yosemite National Park. It is not my favourite.
I've resisted putting these films online as they really do not work as videos onscreen. On a small screen they simply look like badly rendered video. Projected at large scale and with great sound however the effect is or at least was entirely different. Still it is time to write about the ideas behind the work, and this is best done by sharing the work.
# Politics of the Metaverse
A clear motivator for the work comes from a long standing interest in near future worlds and the history of Utopias. George Orwell's work will always be centre stage in this thinking, and I hoped that Almost would lead to a series of work that critiqued these trends in society that many of us could see coming down the Thought Pipeline.
The experience of creating these videos over a couple of months in the studio, led to a much deeper understanding of the nature of these spaces. The time spent passed slowly and while immersed in great ambient music in an amazing warehouse space, a number of earlier thoughts coalesced. It feels like time now to write these down and revisit this installation.
These videos were at that time very rare and hard to find. It took several weeks of searching to dig out of obscure internet archives - some academic, others using experimental modelling software to find videos of the right feel. This was in large part because of the requirement to find openly published public footage, rather than special effects video crafted for the cinema.
The reason for the insistence on using free culture clips was not to do directly with. copyright, but rather the perception that this material. would have profound cultural effects precisely because it was associated with the other cultural factors built into the internet. Almost was about political dialogue - that is what the inability to distinguish real from unreal meant to conversation.
# See also - Almost - Uncanny - Uncanny World - Procedural generation