A multiplicity of lungs greets the viewer in this projection still from the interactive 3D stereographic installation within A Chorus of Lungs exhibit. | Photo courtesy of Leila Sujir and Maria Lantin

Interactive video art has a capacity to speak poignantly to contemporary viewers. Leila Sujir’s and Maria Lantin’s A Chorus Of Lungs, an exhibit currently on display at Centre A, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, deconstructs video as a familiar medium, and blurs the boundary between technology and art.

Video as sculpture

Leila Sujir, an artist and Associate Professor (Inter/Media Cyber Arts Program & Open Media Graduate Program) at Concordia University, has long been fascinated with video.

“I’ve always been curious about time and space, and video was a way of working with [those concepts],” says Sujir.

The artist was always interested in the material quality of video, as well as in creating work that comments on race and cultural displacement. Sujir is of Indian and Scottish-Canadian ancestry, and even many of her early works, such as the 1991 installation My Two Grandmothers, have explored complex cultural identities.

Sujir met Maria Lantin during her New Media Institute residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Lantin is also an artist, and currently the Director of Research and the S3D Centre at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

The two collaborated on a 2006 project called Tulipomania, where they charted the tulip trade route from China to Europe by wrapping objects with video. Both artists were fascinated by the sculptural capacity of the medium.

“It’s a new technology, yet it’s really referencing the studio practices of sculpture and drawing and painting,” explains Sujir.

Lantin and Sujir renewed their collaboration in 2008, when, as the co-investigators of a grant that asked them to look at the evolving relationship of the individual to society, they began to conduct experiments which set up groundwork for A Chorus of Lungs.

“The problems we are facing as a species and members of an ecosystem are requiring collective action, and yet our systems have valued the individual more than the collective for a very long time,” explains Lantin.

A viewer engages with Tulipomania.2, Cycling Outside Leiden, and portion of the Tulipomania Project. | Photo courtesy of Leila Sujir

Accessing the third dimension

It is precisely this relationship between the individual and society, between people and nature, that is the dominant theme in A Chorus of Lungs.

The exhibit consists of two interactive 3D stereographic installations that we are invited to view with special glasses. One is a drawing installation where the viewer’s hand movements expand or contract drawings of lungs that are juxtaposed against shots of various scenery, and accompanied by subtle breathing sounds.

The other half of the exhibit is a sculptural installation where lungs are depicted as more three-dimensional, and where a single set of lungs periodically explodes into a multiplicity. The viewer’s movements offset a recorded soundtrack that either expresses approval or admonishment.

“The lungs…[and the] chorus are the social body one has to continually encounter, where everyone can work together, or, [where] it can [behave as] a mob,” says Sujir.

Both installations feature footage of pelicans on the Bow River in Alberta, which, Lantin says, were used to invoke concepts of health and community.

In fact, because lungs work in a way that is both automatic and controlled, Lantin sees them as a perfect metaphor for the interplay between nature and social paradigms, and a fitting symbol for the fragility of both.

“We often think of the heart as being the seat of life. But in fact, breath is an easier marker, and a more poignant one,” she explains.

Innovation meets creativity

A Chorus of Lungs required a custom built projection system to get around all the incompatibilities inherent in 3D stereographic production processes, and it was designed by Kenny Lozowski from the Banff Centre. In addition, Sujir and Lantin also created custom stereographic camera rigs.

What was really important to Sujir is that the exhibit functions as a 3D collage that the spectator can walk into, and where technology allows one to re-connect with their own physical and social identities.

“Certainly, all of my work has been an attempt to get the sense of presence, and the body back,” she explains.

Haema Sivanesan is the Executive Director of Centre A, and believes Canadian artists like Sujir and Lantin are at the forefront of developing 3D interactive technologies that promote a new kind of engagement with the visual arts.

“This type of interactivity invites a different kind of behaviour in the gallery, a sense of play and excitement. It is bringing in different audience groups, including younger people,” says Sivanesan.

A Chorus of Lungs exhibit runs at Centre A until Jan. 25, 2014. For more information, visit http://www.centrea.org