Topographia Nervosa (Shrine)

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Video installation, corrupted NES games, Buddhist statuette, electric candles

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2021

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Topographia Nervosa (Shrine) is a video installation that considers the relationship among natural landscapes and the inner operations of computers. Nintendo games are corrupted and meticulously arranged in mask layers. The layers are played in continual loops of glitch patterns. More so, a virtual camera hovers, and slowly zooms to reveal the strange ontologies of pixels, titles, and color palettes that underlie the familiar interfaces of 8-bit games. As the glitch patterns within these “nervous landscapes” pulsate and move they draw a relation to natural topographies witnessed from aerial views or in satellite imagery. A Buddhist shrine is positioned before these abstract sequences, complimenting the ensō that contracts and expands at the projection’s center: a sacred circle that represents enlightenment and the totality of the universe. Through the complexities of layers and continually unfolding glitch sequences, Topographia Nervosa (Shrine) imagines the forensic processes of video games as a kind of spiritually oriented, computational landscape, unveiling the vibrant energies that exist below the surface of the gameworlds and within the material world.

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Exhibited at:

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Post/Meta, Arts Warehouse, Delray Beach, FL., August-September 2021.