Uri Dotan

Uri Dotan's 'Disintegrating Ball' series offers up a volley ball that in one video peels apart with the peeled fragments disappearing into space only to later reappear and form the ball whole once again. When the ball peels it reveals a sphere of tangled strings, cords…delineations. Superimposed onto the sphere, before and after peeling, are images from the street, from the intersection, outside Dotan’s studio window. The soundtrack for the piece includes Dotan’s interviews with people on the street. Dotan goes down from his studio, tape recorder in hand, to bridge, one imagines, the distance between image and soul. He asks the people, or more likely completely different people, he has been observing, “how do you feel about crossing the street?” The question sounds suspiciously ridiculous, slightly pathetic. There is a vaguely hostile tone to the answers: “Got to get to the other side don’t you;” “I don’t give hoot one way or another;” “It gets me from point A to point B;” “I don’t feel anything at all. I don’t like this part of the street because it is filled with these awful bumps.” One guesses Dotan is closer to these souls when studying the light reflected from their bodies as it appears on his computer monitor than he is while in these non-conversations. The comments are part of the six channel sound piece which goes on for eight hours or so as the ball falls apart and comes together, over and over again in the looping video that spans just a few minutes.

The idea of this projection is similar to the effect we wish to achieve for the overall piece. Once Carol has made the maquette which we can project onto then we can bring it in and experiment with the projector in the studio to see if this will work or not.