Cathode Mirror Worms (2015) is an interactive video installation by Inflatable Deities - a collaboration with Emily Pelstring, that uses luma-keying to integrate the silhouettes of spectators into an abstract landscape.
The work owes much to 1970s video artists who, drawing influence from the movements of conceptualism and minimalism, created videos that reduced the medium to its basic elements. Live-feed, or closed-circuit monitoring was what distinguished the technology of video from film. This mirror-function of video, its ability to look at itself, or show us ourselves being looked at in real time, was seen as its democratic potential. This politics of social revolution through aesthetic innovation is present in this work, but is melded with a post-modern sensibility, resulting in a hybrid aesthetic that self-consciously superimposes the retro and the new.
