In its layout, the installation referenced a Gothic cathedral: buttress, apse, confessional, altar, stained glass windows, baptismal. It also referred to the Gnostic practice of using imagines agentes- 'agents of memory' - active images that would serve as mnemonic devices, helping their viewers remember information that had been repressed or denounced. These 'agents' were used as a form of spiritual resistance against the didactic images of the medieval Church.
This installation became a type of 'memory theatre', bringing the performer's 'underground' experiences back to life through video image-objects to be re-experienced by the audience. The physicality of these moments were emphasized above their images, which were shown distorted amidst moving parts, electrical and plumbing infrastructure, and the sounds from the bowels of the university.
Dependent entirely upon the exhibition viewer to take away the memories of the institution's underground as a bodily witness, the installation recalled Simonides, the Greek poet who - according to Francis Yates' The Art of Memory - was the first to theorize memory as a corporeal event. Taken on by their audience, in a sense, the animated sculptures create electro-mechanical 'resistance' loops - their materiality posing an interference to the 'current'. This noise in the system prevents a clean transmission of the image of experience, but also aids in the understanding of it. In this way, the project presented a position against a media state (and the digitization of art) whose prevailing aesthetic priviledges the spectacular over the haptic.
Here the multi-media performance document is catechretic - a monstrous mechanically-living body made of visual display and kinetics. It suggests the potential of using art and media practice to make and inhabit metaphors of escape (Gr.metaphorin, 'passage') away from dominant didactic practices.