Digital Summer
Manchester June/July 98

Celebrating innovation and creativity in science and technology

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the birth of 'The Baby' - the first stored program computer - Digital Summer 98 will dominate its birthplace, Manchester, from June to September. There is no disputing the importance the computer has had - Digital Summer 98 will illustrate the significance of the birth of the computer age. Exhibitions, concerts, festivals, visual and performing arts events and educational legacy projects will demonstrate how the computer has impacted globally on every aspect of our lives.

Transparent Room

Transparent Room will suspend the viewer in a virtual space - here you see through the walls and the ceiling to the sky, hidden rooms, the street outside. The room that they enter will no longer exist, its confining walls replaced by projections of the city its time accelerated as clouds speed by, cars and people in the street outside racing through their lives. As the time passes, the views become details, then textures and finally just single colours of the objects when seen from this detailed perspective. The images abstract as they are magnified. Viewers entering the room may start by seeing just moving colours or they may observe their own city. Information will break down or assemble all around them.

Transparent Room is a further development of a body of work by Michael Pinsky which distorts and exaggerates real time and space to produce photographic art work located between the moving and still image. A day is compressed and a single focus on an image is enhanced and further enhanced in order to render the viewer increasingly tiny within a space.

Transparent Room asks the viewer to suspend their belief in real time and space in order to occupy the landscape of the installation. The works are not simply formal photographic representations of time - they refer back to the audience and require the viewers to immerse themselves and participate in an imaginary changing landscape.