Straylight - an Interactive Video Installation within the Gallery exhibit Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box was a collaboration of gallery installations, curated and managed by Laurie O'Brien. My design and implementation of Straylight was a reaction to the concept of technology as an element within the Pandora Myth.

The aesthetic of a Victorian Era science fair was the through line within the exhibit, and tied the multiple installations together. I felt inclined to showcase the decay of an Industrial revolution would make an immediate statement regarding man’s technological advances of that era.

The 8'0" high steel box structure was welded out of rusted shipping containers; a loose steampunk homage to the idea of "Straylight" in Neuromancer by William Gibson.
Gibson’s Villa Straylight is described as a mainframe of computer control within a “Gothic folly”, a false recreated and ornamental ruin found in gardens of wealthy Victorian Estates. My parody of this was a false industrial space within a Victorian themed exhibit.

The initial desire of the media aspect within Straylight was first to have people explore the box, turning the various knobs and water faucets, playing with the glass funnel and other tactile items exposed and placed within reach, and then realize it was controlling the projected. I wanted people to become curious about these simple items, how each related to the abstract projected imagery, as different items were able to influence the content or composition if the media. Most people interacted until they created a composition if their own, with varying glitches and unique layering.

In doing so, every person who interacted left an imprint in the software patch that in turn, ran the media.
I intertwined fantasy and technology in an attempt to intrigue the creative masses, the desire to make something were the spectators explored in a harmless innocence, a tribute to man’s Pandoric curiosity and the damage ability within
The projected imagery was made up of symbolic Victorian era art and artifacts, mostly filmed in Boston and New York, with ink pen sketches from a European street artist. I also included places where Historical moments occurred, religious iconography of Eve, and textured images of decaying metal.

The Villa Straylight is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage. By the standards of the archipelago, ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull. Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise. At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool… - the essay of 3Jane in Neuromancer