SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED ONLY ONCE
An animated panorama by Roderick Coover

SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED ONLY ONCE is a recent mutlimedia work by Roderick COOVER. It is an animated panorama designed for single and two-channel full wall projection with audio. Recorded in Mexico City, the work blends five narrative fragments in a slowly revolving and evolving double panorama that takes the form of a mobius strip. The piece follows a female protagonist, a male counterpart, and other characters in a manner that suggests narrative but never becomes it. Instead it’s an expression of temperament or a consciousness – a searching, a longing, a loneliness.

SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED ONLY ONCE is the result of a collaboration between media artist Roderick Coover and fiction writer Deb Olin Unferth with vocals performed by Jodi Gilbert.

Installations include:
Esther Klein Gallery, Panoramas and other circular stories, January - March 2007
University of Pennsylvania, Reel Travel, May 2007
SIGGRAPH, August 2007
North Park Gallery and ELO, Visionary Landscapes, May 2008

Click Here to read a review of this work in the May 2007 ART PAPERS
Click Here for pdf examples of exhibition layouts for single wall and two wall versions.
Click Here to read forthcoming e-essay about the work published in ethnographiques, Summer 2008.
Click Here to view low resolution FLASH sample.

CREDITS

THE ARTISTS
Roderick Coover's (artist/director-producer) films and new media works have been featured internationally. His distributed media works include the 2007 DVD, The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank), the 2005 DVD, Language of Wine and the 2003 CD-ROM, Cultures In Webs. He is the recipient of LEF, Fulbright and Mellon fellowships.

Deb Olin Unferth's (text) fiction includes a novel and collection of short stories published by McSweeney's as well as short fictions published in Harper's, Conjunctions, Fence, NOON, McSweeney's, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and elsewhere.

Jodi Gilbert (Singer-composer) is a Dutch singer- composer who has performed with Meredith Monk, Misha Mengelberg, Michael Moore, Roscoe Mitchell among others, and has several cds out with her bands Rasp/Hasp, The Voice is the Matter, and Spoon 3.

Michael Moore (Musician) is a jazz musician who leads the Dutch-based ensemble Available Jelly and who has released over 32 CDs and records.

Casting: Nicki Mondellini
Cast: Daniel Berlanga, Alejandra Briseño, Ricardo Garcia, Jairo Gomez, Daniel Habif, Isabel Martínez, Alejandro Sirvent
Music Composition: Jodi Gilbert
Voices: Jodi Gilbert, Grainne Delaney
Little instruments: Jodi Gilbert
Clarinet and field recording: Michael Moore
Studio recordist: Frank van der Weij
Recording mix: Jodi Gilbert, Frank van der Weij
Multitrack mix, Remastering: Roderick Coover
Thanks also to Cathy Peyrot des Gachons
Photography, Editing and Effects: Roderick Coover
Lyrics: Deb Olin Unferth
Director and Producer: Roderick Coover
Filmed in Mexico City

Artist Statement

The digital theorist Lev Manovich has been a proponent of the idea that new media tools—such as layering and compositing—are giving rise to highly visual hybrid language (Manovich 2002). Artists exploring the spatial and navigational tropes of this emergent language include Talan Memmott ("Berth of V.Ness"), John Cayley ("What we will"), Labyrinth Project ("Mysteries and Desires"), and Jeffrey Shaw ("Place Hempi"). My approach involves a virtual realization of spatial metaphors that inter-engage poetics of visual arts, time-based media and literary forms, such as, for example, by fusing notions of "path", "sentence", "scroll", and "longtake." I explore digital interface and ways that screen space can be use to fuse and juxtapose prior media forms like the panorama, landscape photograph, and video.

My animated panoramas like "Something That Happened Only Once" are built through layering and compositing hundreds of elements, in this case photos recorded on one day in 2006 at a plaza in Mexico City. The work revolves in front of the viewer in a slow moving pan with both static and motion elements. Audio is also layered. Found-sounds mix with fragments of text spoken and sung by a narrator-protagonist who is trying to express her own sense of place and displacement looking out upon the plaza. Unlike the traditional photographic panorama or cinematic pan, here the panorama is a collection of moments that may be independent from the seemingly definitive but fundamentally illusory authority of the framed contiguity. Each cycle appears to last about 11 minutes; however a viewer quickly recognizes that the cycles differ. Free floating elements—composited in diverse rates of frequency and order—run counter to the usually dominating singular order of time given by the technological apparatus of the pan. As the image turns, the viewer will recognize that the second time around is not the same as the first. Elements that make up the panorama, such as images of individuals, follow actions at rates shaped by their own narratives and not by the singular structure of time (as traditionally established by the recording device).

As metaphors of digital tools, interface ("desktop") and the "Web" are drawn from pre-existing cultural language(s), my aesthetic goals are intertwined with social-environmental questions; through juxtapositioning and hybridization, I ask what the relationships are between cultural narratives about the land and the pictorial forms by which we might express our relationships to it. In "Voyage Into The Unknown," users join John Wesley Powell's famous journey down the Colorado River that slowly reveals a landscape dotted with interactive media objects and side routes. The expository focus of this documentary work concerning the pre-cinema age, is how an adventure is transformed into images that feed that cultural imaginary. Playing on visual conventions of differing periods, the project draws parallels between artistic conceptualizations of the land and the visual forms by which a land is visualized. The interlinked environments include both still and motion media elements. Virtual settings blend fictive landscapes and found materials, photographs and recordings drawing viewers to negotiate between differing modes of adventure and reflection. Users engage in choice-making and path-building to navigate interactive landscapes blending anachronistic elements of fact and fiction, image and text, still and time-based artifacts.