At the eye in London Fall 2011
Fractures and Flight: An Interview with David Colagiovanni by Cameron Turner from Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination
Went live early october. Here’s a few excepts:
An artist whose engaging output spans gallery installation, new media, internet art, and video, David Colagiovanni’s work is a studied investigation into the bodily and spatial forces which tether us to the ground and which threaten to unmoor us. In the recent “Music for New Mexico,” Colagiovanni destroyed—or at least dented—a series of porcelain, glass, and metal bells by letting them plummet to a cratered surface somewhere in New Mexico. The result? A looped video sequence that plays with the film’s speed. As it picks up its pace, it suggests first a tolling, elegiac mourning for lost place, then a frenzied postmodern testament to place that is inseparable from YouTube documentation and an Internet audience, and finally a fractured unknowability of place that pays respect to the recalcitrant New Mexico landscape. The carnage is enrapturing as the bells implode, boom, violently fly off screen, squeak, gracefully toll, and turn to grainy powder.
TURNER: You’ve described how one of your current goals as an artist is to make video more spatial, visceral, and bodily, which is evident in your innovative, immersive work at the Morehead dome. I love this idea, since planetariums often symbolize both a “magic lantern” escape from physical reality as well as a more thorough understanding of that reality when an audience witnesses the cosmos’s bigger picture. You’ve mentioned that your work is preoccupied with flight and escape; I’m wondering how you’ve engaged or played with the planetarium’s more didactic, educational, or grounding roles in your art at Morehead, if at all.
COLAGIOVANNI: The planetarium has amazing spatial potential. It’s also a space that transports us to the stars and other planets, a magic lantern (as you say), a time-machine, an education device, and much more. I am constantly thinking about its uses and history when I create an experience for the dome. My initial interest in working with the Morehead Planetarium comes from its history as an astronaut training simulator for the Apollo missions. From 1960 to 1975, The Morehead Planetarium was used to train American astronauts on celestial recognition. The training they did here allowed them to properly orient their spacecraft and successfully complete missions in the event of an automatic guidance or navigation systems failure. If you sit in the planetarium and look up at the dome, you are experiencing the same space as every astronaut who ever walked on the moon—an inspirational thought given that the Morehead serves about 90,000 school children per year and has had over 5 million people visit since it opened. My first work for the dome, “Charting Course for the Unknown,” is an homage to the Apollo astronauts and the surface of the planetarium. Like an early astronaut simulation, it describes a space that has yet to be fully explored. Read more here
