In this solo narrative installation, the artist conducts a kind of self-surveillance, reflecting on memories of growing up amid the Cold War in Eastern Europe and drawing parallels to the present Internet age of commercial and political surveillance. Voice is matched to image in precise counterpoint: neither the simple sync of narrative film nor the asynchronous sound of the experimental tradition, but rather a precise association of word to image in which the gap between the two tells as much as the connection.

Trace was commissioned by Bell Labs (Lucent) and by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it ran as an installation during the Next Wave Festival of 2001. It consisted of a single projection with a spatialized multi-speaker sound system designed by Nicolas Tsingos of Bell Labs. The installation, designed by architect Marco Steinberg, relied heavily on homasote insulaton material, which I valued not only for its sound-dampening capability but also for its gray evocation of the so-called satellite countries of Eastern Europe.

Twenty-seven minutes long, the piece has 24 scenes. I narrated most of them, but a few were in a woman’s voice (narrated by Lisa Cunningham, with three written by Siobhan Scarry). The scenes do not advance an obvious narrative; instead, recurring themes (medical, piano, incest, iron curtain, childhood games, etc) interweave unpredictably as the work unfolds.

In devising the underlying structure of Trace, I attempted to insure that these thematic interweavings are both logical and surprising.

I discovered that a similar set of juxtapositions is present in the usage of the word “trace” itself, and these seem even to shadow many of the threads running through the artwork’s texts; and so I put a selection of these in the hallway leading to the installation.

Online version

I have found Trace to be a difficult work to present outside its original installation design, which is itself hard to reconstruct. Its minimal visual style (frequently blank black) does not come across so well at small scale. Even so, with a little effort, you can try. I’ve made a revised version of the piece for the web, which pares down the number of scenes, removes the second female voice, and adds an enhanced sound score by Terry Pender. You may start viewing it here; headphones are recommended.