Misread Signs Installation
Audiovisual performance featuring projected animation, animatronic sculptures, music, and movement.
Misread Signs
Three channel audiovisual installation
2019
Duration: 12 minutes
Concept, paintings, animations, sculptures by Yuliya Lanina
Music and sound design by José Martínez
Immersive CAVE system
5670x1080 px
Projection measurements: 194’(H) x 345’(W) x 177’(D) Technical support: Ted Johnson and Michael McKellar
"Misread Signs" is a multimedia three channel installation. It explores the effects of trauma on human psyche. All images are hand painted and then animated on the computer. Each channel is projected onto the adjacent walls, creating a seamless immersive story.
Lanina’s images are inspired by the Surrealist and Dada approach to creating images, with the subconscious taking the lead and leaving analytical thinking behind and by embracing the nonsensical and surprising. By exploring the life of fantastic and bizarre creatures, the artist is able to reach places unavailable to the rational self, inviting the audience to do the same. In this piece, most of the characters on the screen are masked.
In the projected animation, Lanina’s collaborator, composer José Martinez uses recordings of Lanina’s voice as his audio material, rendering her deeply personal text and songs beyond recognition while transforming her voice to the extreme in order to convey the urgency of expression.
The piece transcends the particulars of artist’s life experience into a universal story of perseverance and asks us to reflect on our connection to ourselves, to our past and to each other.
The show borrows its title from a poem by Jennifer Atkinson.
This project is supported in part by Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, I-Park, Puffin Foundation, grayDUCK gallery and The Center of Women and Their Work Inc.
Photos by Scott David Gordon and Leon Alesi
Link to middle channel animation with sound (short version)
Link to middle animation with sound (full version)
Excerpt from the interview with AI Stand Up Comedian Lucille Trackball