Ectoplasmic Scream

Ectoplasmic Scream

Artist: Doug Jarvis

in collaboration with Limbic Media

Installation live from November 10, 2011 to December 31, 2011

Our Interactive Film and Video Series begins with Ectoplasmic Scream in collaboration with media artist Doug Jarvis. The window gallery has been reconfigured as a contemporary cabinet of curiosity. Acting as a spiritual medium, a digital Doug Jarvis will follow foot traffic with his eyes. If you stop to look, he will lock eyes with yours. Using facial tracking technology, the digital Doug will mirror movements made by your mouth opening and closing. Volumes of “ectoplasm” will project onto the screen if you scream, reflecting your face and surroundings inside the streaming substance.

The street level installation is live  at 1119 Fort Street, Victoria BC, everyday from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. More then one person facing the window can confuse the installation. Doug’s digital head will face directly forward with his eyes open to indicate that he has found a face to track. Tilting your head back slightly can improve the mouth tracking.

Artist Statement

Ectoplasmic Scream is an interactive multi-media art installation that uses a video game interface to manifest an otherworldly substance in another dimension. Employing a variety of motion capture and digital imaging techniques, window gallery participants are able to manifest an ectoplasm inspired substance in a virtual environment. An onscreen avatar mimics participant’s face and mouth actions to generate the ectoplasmic scream. This relationship between the viewer and the screen explores the human potential to be active and present in more than one dimension, challenging popular ideas of reality, the virtual, and presence in a digitally mediated world.

Ectoplasmic Scream is inspired by spirit photography from the 1930’s that exposed the presence of ectoplasm, or teleplasms; the manifestation of an other worldly spirit emanating from the body of a medium during a séance ritual. This mode of spirit communication accompanied table lifting, floating instruments, knocking and wrapping sounds, among a host of other phenomena experienced during séance rituals. During the 1920-30’s, Dr. Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and his colleagues of Winnipeg, Manitoba produced extensive photo and document records of paranormal research that are now housed in a physical archive at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, as well as transcribed and made available online at http://thehamiltonfiles.info/.

Ectoplasm is a vehicle for a ghost or spirit to physically become present in another dimension. By animating the physical ‘plasm’ of the host medium outside of their body, the substance takes on its own agency, secreting and retracting from any orifice of the medium body. Ectoplasm would occasionally contain a photographic representation of the entity communicating from beyond the living. The relationship between the medium’s body and the visiting spirit represents an inter-dimensional collaboration, bridging physical and metaphysical entities in a suspended reality. Ectoplasmic Scream is an opportunity to explore the boundaries between actual and virtual worlds of the human experience.

Doug Jarvis is an artist/curator living in Victoria, BC. He is a founding member of both the avatar performance art group Second Front and the Noxious Sector art collective. He recently co-directed the Digital Art Weeks 2011 OFF LABEL Festival in Victoria, BC and holds an MFA from the University of Guelph.