The Treachery of Sanctuary
Park City, Utah – January 22 - February 1 (Sundance 2016)
The Treachery of Sanctuary (2015) is a modern art piece that was featured as part of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival’s 10th anniversary of the "New Frontiers” exhibition. Since its inception, the pop up exhibition space has been dedicated to New Media art forms that exploit and push the limits and purposes of the latest technology. "New Frontiers" historically, focused on creating alternative, immersive narrative experiences that both showcase new audio-visual mediums and also aspire to exploit them for sublime ends. It is at this annual exhibition that the Oculus Rift, among other new tech, could be demo’d by the public. But the cutting-edge nature of the materials can encroach upon the artist’s intent, due simply to the average artist having limited technical knowledge and an inability to wield these digital mediums. But over the years, motion graphics and virtual reality has gained ground in consumer accessibility and user-friendlyness; even the average secondary school student is exposed to Photoshop and InDesign in computer class. It seems that enough time has passed that a new tribe of digital generation artists are mastering their tools and using them to add their voice to the burgeoning sect of transmedia art.
One of these artists is Chris Milk, along with his team of graphic artists, video game designers, software engineers, and architects. The work is hosted in it’s own 500+ square foot tent reaching over 20 feet high in order to house the three enormous canvases the make up Milk's digital tryptic. Upon entering the giant, dark tent, the viewer is ushered to stand before the first canvas with a partner. The canvases are the source of illumination in the blackened room, which has a floor that is mostly covered in a shallow, very still pool that acts as a mirror to the canvases. It is very like walking into a sanctuary, with its sacred baptismal waters and monochromatic stained-glassed “windows” stretching heavenward. As the worshippers approach the fount before the first canvas, their shadows appear in life-size scale beneath a swirling cloud of black birds. Without the a light source in this surreal and nonsensical environment, the viewer naturally tests her shadow, like Peter Pan, to see if it will obey her motions and truly belongs to her. In a surprising flurry, she and her partner’s figures begin to disintegrate into ascending birds, bursting upward to join the rest their community in the sky. In matter of moments, the shadows are completely gone having joined the community of circling birds above.
The viewer enters the second panel and, for a moment, the hovering birds continue in their flocking pattern; but this time, they detect presence as foreign and dive at the viewers' shadows, picking them a part bit by bit, accelerating the pace and flying away with them until there is nothing left. The silhouettes have been completely consumed and the partners are compelled to confirm their continued physical existence, despite Hitchcock-ian nightmare that the second panel betrayed them to.
The final canvas is experienced solo. This separation of the duo adds to the anxiety introduced in the previous canvas. In the same fashion as before, a flock of birds hangs over the shadow of the viewer. Reasonably hesitant to invite the avians to a feast, it takes a little more time before the viewer decides to extend her arms, unsure of what kind of attention it will call. Upon cautiously swinging limbs, the viewer is suddenly endowed with massive feathered wings that, when extended upward, nearly reach the ceiling. The waft of the wings is an overpowering and exhilarating sound in the room and the viewer is compelled to create a rhythm, accelerating until their body, fully transformed into an angelic figure, ascends to the heavens above.
The secret to the exhibit is an unexpected technology: Kinect video cameras that are usually used for the Microsoft Xbox gaming console. In the dark tent, the bright white panels provide a high contrast backdrop for participants' contours to be detected by the camera and then projected on to the panel. This gives the illusion that a shadow is being cast, but, because there is no light source, the viewer can feel more like they are interacting with a mirror or perhaps an even more mysterious and soul-like version of themselves. While some viewers even checked above their head to see if any real-life seagulls were swirling above there was one, unfortunate tell-tale sign of the digital magic in the pixelation the silhouette (which sometimes looked unlike a silhouette at all or was lost momentarily by the motion-sensing Kinect). But these criticisms, while often commented on by the digital generation passing through the tent, were always hushed by the time the participants reached their breathtaking angelic form in the end.
The story told in the three simple panels can be overlaid on any number of ancient or modern myths, from Peter Pan to the Christ story to the Odyssey, all with their essential plots points more or less summarized in a call, a betrayal, and victory or tragedy. Milk’s artist statement clearly outlines the variety of monomythic themes he wishes to express in the tryptic including the narrative of birth to death and, as in the title of the peace, faith to treachery. Using modern human tools and a deceitfully simple black and white presentation, Milk continues the ancient tradition of pictorial storying telling and appropriates our current technology, and even our contemporary penchant for interaction and play, onto artful, soul-searching quest. Despite having never experienced an installation like Treachery, the viewer is bound to be familiar with the tropes he exemplifies, and therefore able to appreciate without confusion or obscurity the magnificence and scale of the exhibit. By distilling the most common faith experiences into three clear narrative events, a universal language of positive, negative, and transcendence can be garnered by a broad array of participants from any creed or nation.
The overall effect of the camera, projection, and dark, crowd-controlled environment is magnificent and overwhelming. The viewer is quite successfully enveloped into the work’s narrative and meta narrative, even in spite of the digital seams that sometimes show. For this reason, two hour lines form in the snow outside the tent, all for the a chance to spend five or six minutes moving from communion to tragedy and finally ascension. In some ways, the pixilated edges of one’s silhouette are a nice reminder that there are no ravenous pigeons waiting to descend on we human intruders and there is further comfort in the neutralizing effect that makes almost all projected figures look similar, with only height and hair length to differentiate. Milk’s Treachery of Sanctuary is, in fact, a sanctuary in form and in practice: to participate in Treachery is also to participate in humanity.