Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

the moving color “blades” to violently slice my body (shadow) lengthwise. After being in the space for about fifteen minutes, I became more interested in the projectors and speakers. I imagined that the images and sounds emerged from the projectors. The wall seemed to be the passive victim to their attack; the sprocket holes seemed to be trying frantically to escape, to no avail. No one was in the room when I left; as I walked away and the sound slowly faded away, I imagined that the room was angry at me for leaving, but it could do nothing but make its repetitive noise in a vain attempt to draw me back in again.

                The screens on the wall form a rectangle which is analogous to a lake; waves are represented by color frames and border lines between them. The waves hit left and right shores and reverse direction to repeat the process indefinitely. The sound of breaking glass is analogous to the sound of waves hitting a shore. The entire rectangle can also be seen as a window of a moving vehicle passing a wall of colors, or as a window of a stationary room with movement going on outside. A definite rhythm is established with pairs of shapes. For example, a pair of sprocket holes may collide, bounce off each other, and collide again to repeat the process. Another rhythm can be perceived in the alternating acceleration and deceleration of shaped such as sprocket holes and frame borders. A single color occasionally “tries” to make its way across all four screens, but usually it is transformed into another color before completing its journey. The sound resembles the sound of the breaking of a large object such as a pitcher made of thick glass. If one were to drop a pitcher on the installation floor, the sound produced would be almost identical to the recorded sound radiating from the speak-