The Gambit is a portable interactive animation sited in the lobby of the Westin-Bonaventure Hotel (John Portman, 1977). The medium of the project is a digital compass attached to a PDA ("personal digital assistant") with a two and a quarter inch by three and a quarter inch color screen and headphones. This apparatus worn by the viewer displays images of spaces normally inaccessible to the viewer´s vision from within the Westin´s lobby, in other words, as if you´re seeing through walls with a kind of periscope.

The "seeing through the walls" has a shape, like Gordon Matta Clark's cuts through buildings. The shape is configured by animated still images and sound. The still images and sound tell a story. The story is of a hotel flower arranger, and of a parallel world where flower arrangements have archival and narrative abilities.

The viewer of the piece stands in the lobby of the hotel with the PDA in her hand, headphones on her ears and the compass in a small case over her shoulder. As she begins to walk around, she sees changing still-images on the screen and hears spoken words and sound through the headphones. The changing compass coordinates, being read by the PDA, are expressed as changes in the images and sound on the screen of the PDA and in the headphones.

The device intensifies the present by superimposing illusion on reality, and by superimposing a fictive narrative over a spatial narrative. The spatial organization of the terrain around the hotel is brought inside the lobby and made time-specific, and the narrative elaborates the time-specificity. The device mediates between the time of the present inhabited by the viewer and the differently ordered time inhabited by the character.

There is a difference in the playback of the images and the playback of the sound: The playback of the voice-over measures the speed of viewer´s displacement across the compass co-ordinates, while the images measure her real-time physical location. For example, if the viewer turns clockwise quickly and stops, the pictures move forward through the sequence quickly and stop. If she turns quickly she will hear fragments of the voice-over even after she has stopped, but not if she had moved slowly. If she goes backwards, previous images are repeated, while the story moves forward.

The piece is about the exploration of the device and narrative. No two viewers will experience the identical correspondence of sound, image and movement through site. In its combination of animated still-image with voice-over the piece is inspired by Chris Marker´s La Jetté (1962); the fragmentary image/word segments make it more like Around and About (1980) by Gary Hill. A key difference with respect to these other two pieces is that in The Gambit the combination of word and image depends on movement.

Site

The site, the lobby of Portman´s reflective glass tower, the Westin-Bonaventure hotel, is well known and well used, primarily by business travelers. It´s a glitzy, windowless, bi-axially symmetrical space ornately decorated with flower arrangements, planters, fountains and "Chia" sculptures. It functions as a waiting area, meeting place, and shopping mall: A location popular for conventions, conferences and movie-sets. Frederic Jameson wrote of the hotel as being a "full-blown post-modern building".

Structure of Images

The images are structured according to a spiral pattern inscribed in the memory of the computer that mirrors a spiral pattern inscribed on a map of the area surrounding the hotel. The spiral is expressed in terms of a shift from long-shot, mid-range to close-up images. As the viewer moves around the lobby, and turns on her own axis, the computer, via the compass, makes a correspondence between her trajectory and the spiral on the map.

When the device is first switched on, the screen shows the view from the circular, glazed revolving restaurant 35 stories above the windowless lobby, as if the viewer had a periscope to see through the floors of the hotel and out over the city. As the viewer walks around, the panorama of the city changes, according to which way she is facing. In the narrative, these first images constitute an establishing shot. The "real" view evolves into fiction as the viewer completes one rotation of the spiral. After the first rotation, the images are no longer from above looking over the city. They are at street level, and introduce a character. The photos of the female character are taken at nodal points along a spiral path wrapping around the hotel. The spiral, arbitrarily drawn on a map with the hotel as its center, begins 1.25 miles away from the hotel and winds its way through the city looping closer and closer to the hotel, and ultimately, inside the lobby.

There are 78 nodes on the spiral corresponding to the intersection of the spiral with the eight compass axes of N, NW, W, SWŠ Each node is a location for a photo. The farthest point on the spiral is associated with a long shot. The closest point on the spiral is an extreme close-up. With every photo along the spiral path, the character moves one step closer. If the viewer were to spin around and trigger a quick succession of changes in compass locations, she would see the character approaching, occluding more and more of her context. This enacts a traditional cinematic structure, namely the sliding axis between space and character that corresponds to the trajectory from long-shot to close ­up. As the photos change, the character occupies a different quadrant of the frame, from left to right, with each successive point along the spiral. The character is also turning on her axis by one-quarter turn with each photo. This rotating movement reinforces the pattern set up by the character moving closer and weaving back and forth across the frame.

Story

The protagonist has a job as the flower arranger for the hotel. The hotel's flower arrangements, for example those in the lobby, have unusual powers of recording and transmitting stories, almost as if they were a kind of computer, or a kind of book. The stories they tell are of the hotel guests both occupying rooms in the present, and going back in time.

Structure of Story and Sound

The story is broken up into forty-four fragments. The first few fragments are about a sentence long, and they decrease in length until the last ones, which are only a word long. The beginning of the story is told in the first person, the middle is in the third person, and the first person returns in the last ten fragments. The voice-over clips are programmed to play every time the viewer crosses a compass co-ordinate, regardless of the direction of rotation. Once a text fragment has been heard, and no more compass co-ordinates have been crossed (the viewer is not turning), she hears one of four randomly selected looping samples of music. The samples are taken from LaMonte Young´s "The Well-Tuned Piano". In the establishing shot sequence at the beginning, and at the end, where you see pictures of the lobby without the character, other music-clips take the place of the narrative, and are triggered in the same way as the words in the rest of the piece.