WATERLILLIES

"The water in which Narcissus sees what he shouldn’t is not a mirror, capable of producing a distinct and definite image--in the picture the undepicted, the unstable unknown of a representation without presence, which reflects no model: he sees the nameless one whom only the name he does not have could hold at a distance."
Maurice Blanchot The Writing of the Disaster

"Waterlilies" is an attempt to develop and visualize in real space a large composite painting/ video projection mural where each brushstroke/ pixel is constituted by live video feeds (live webcams in reall time and live streams) taken directly from the Internet. The title is an obvious analogy to Claude Monet’s Waterlilies and to painting as a medium today in relation to new technology.

The overall effect is that of a wall painting made of a grid of transmissions/ spectacles. Information provided is readable only in terms of its abstract quality (color, volume of brightness). The shimmering abstract surface is constituted of a multitude of individual spectacles that are lost in the virtual crowd. Individual activity is submerged within a deluge of projections/ brushstrokes. Individual web-cam information is washed away by the resolution of an image, a 'thumbnail' size of a single frame, and conditions of lighting when day light merges with the projection, and dissolves the beam. This image offers no narrative or plot., nor does it aspire to do so. It attempts to be a "beautiful abstract image" whose existence is made possible through the accumulation of a multitude of solitary existences.