Works of digital art

“Exhibits by Zoe Beloff”

Through November 30

Pittsburgh Filmmakers Melwood Gallery

477… “Exhibits by Zoe Beloff”

Through November 30

Pittsburgh Filmmakers Melwood Gallery

477 Melwood Avenue, North Oakland

(412) 681-5449

Zoe Beloff of Scotland began her computer-based artwork with a series of online Web cam movies, in which she was the sole performer. This medium suited her because she was poor – and it presented an inexpensive way to experiment with time and story. And Beloff found the distorted images produced by early Web cams to be appealing. Her first thought – “This is beautiful.” The short films she created with this early technology seemed almost to be shot from beyond the grave. In her current exhibit, Beloff is still concerned with time and story, and she is still intrigued with otherworldliness, but her technology has been upgraded.

The exhibit, located at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers Melwood Gallery, includes two interactive CD-ROMs, “Where Where There There Where” and “Beyond.” One of Beloff’s motivations in creating these CD-ROMs was an “investigation of how people in the late 19th century thought of technology … Before home movies, people had to conjure up apparitions.” Hence the image of a seance, the central image of one work. Exploring the virtual worlds existing on these CD-ROMs is something that Beloff compares to going to a flea market – you’re bound to find something you weren’t looking for.

The third work in Beloff’s exhibit is “The Influencing Machine of Natalija A.” This installation is Beloff’s interpretation of a famous psychoanalytic case study that took place in 1919 in Vienna. It moves “away from the computer screen, bringing ideas into our world.” In the piece, Beloff re-imagines the hallucinations of Miss Natalija A, a schizophrenic woman who believed her mind was being controlled by an electrical apparatus that had been implanted in her brain.

In “The Influencing Machine of Natalija A,” viewers adopt the role of the German physicians who supposedly controlled the apparatus, selecting a series of images taken mostly from early TV set-ups. The visual apparitions are accompanied by narration and sounds of various extreme wavelengths. Beloff found herself adopting the persona of the schizophrenic, wondering, “what wavelengths would you hear?” Some of those sounds she pulled from random radio noise believed by various governments to be spy communication.

Beloff, a 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, has had her work shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Pacific Film Archives and the Pompidou Center. This exhibit advances the opportunity for Pittsburgh audiences to enter her unique and mysterious digital worlds.