description

Frozen Palaces creates an uncanny experience in which time itself appears to have stopped. The project comprises collections of scenes photographed and rendered as navigable panoramas using Apple’s QuickTime VR. In this landscape of interlocking dreams, people themselves have the status of objects — strange clues to be found and connected in the otherwise deserted rooms, corridors and streets.

The project links a series of disconnected scenes all staged in a large deserted house. In each of the rooms, a series of events — love affairs, murders, ghostly levitations, parties — is halted at some banal or significant moment, while the viewer alone is free to move, explore and investigate. In place of a rigidly defined game or a single narrative to be discovered, Frozen Palaces invites the user into an experience more akin to that of wandering, of trying out versions of the truth and of making playful connections.

© Hugo Glendinning/Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment 1997. CD-ROM. 

Published on artintact 5, ZKM—Institute for Visual Media (Karlsruhe, Germany).