GARY HILL

Variable number of video projectors, DVD players, and speakers, and high-definition server (color and black-and-white, sound)

Unique (site specific for the Coliseum and Temple of Venus and Rome, Rome, Italy)

Inspired by the inexhaustible play of history and the symbols inherent to Rome, this commissioned multivalent work incorporates multiple projections with sound, within the Coliseum and Temple of Venus and Rome.

According to the artist, “The idea of Resounding Arches / Archi Risonanti is to simultaneously engender a present and visceral connection to both history and the future as if they ebb and flow from the same place. The central manifestation of this will be through a series of projections of full body nudes, within the arches of the Coliseum, which are hybrid constructions using actual people and computer simulation of various kinds. Each figure emerges holding a ‘meta-mythological’ instrument which, as it is blown, grows and changes along with the sound it generates – like an image/sound möbius band looking for new topologies. The images will reveal themselves slowly in the form of non-invasive apparitions of  figures, through light and sound – new presences that impose themselves in the Coliseum as if they had always haunted the physical and mental spaces of the site – and the sounds will emerge from the various dark passages of  the Coliseum at random intervals, to create a kind of calling or signaling that produces a metaphorical arching across the varying precepts of space and time.”

Additional projections are visible within grated arches under the plateau of the Forum and against the Temple of Venus and Rome.  These include pairings of computer-generated objects, such as a tree and chandelier, gyroscope and apple, a man’s legs and open book, and solitary tents flapping in the breeze.