David Niles? Vic Noir video digital art installation debuts at One Arts Plaza.
BY CHRIS BYRNE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID NILES
David Niles? latest project in Dallas, Vic Noir, has been installed at One Arts Plaza on Routh Street. The piece was commissioned by real estate developer Lucy Billingsley who became acquainted with Niles? work via his state-of-the-art video projections at the George W. Bush Freedom Hall.
Niles began his career in Manhattan in the late 1960s as an architect, but voraciously moved on to learn the job skills required for live theater, sound recording, film, and television production, often collaborating on technologies that didn?t exist yet and which we now take for granted. Based in Paris from 1969 to 1987, he opened the first High Definition Television studio in 1984 and was given the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He made hundreds of commercials and music videos. Since 2006, he has enjoyed concentrating on what he calls ?kinetic architecture??large grids of LED screens in building lobbies delivering fantastic imagery through a multi-media spectacle. The most complex is the Comcast Center in Philadelphia, which utilizes artificial intelligence to continuously and subtly alter the programming. Of course, it was The People, the centerpiece of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, that provided most denizens of the region their first exposure to Niles? work.
After travelling to the designer?s Palm Beach studio, Billingsley observed that ?to watch David at work is to see the imagination unleashed. His in-depth scientific knowledge merges with his sense of beauty, movement, and music. His creations can only happen because he is an expert in all these areas. He creates magical worlds that make us laugh, wonder, and smile.?
The final installation took close to a year to complete and entailed weeks of preparatory photography involving the classically trained Parisian dancer Marine Rosse. An integral part of the experience is the musical score, which was composed, performed, and recorded by Niles. Eight audiovisual sequences, which are roughly two minutes each, emanate from a pair of floor-to-ceiling high-definition video screens on either side of the elevator banks in the One Arts Plaza lobby. Here a series of surreal and theatrical images morph into each other, creating an ambient environment. An indoor chamber fills with water, out of which a woman leaps to perform a dance in Victorian costume. The camera slowly scuttles up darkened tree trunks to reveal bodies writhing about inside translucent fabric cocoons suspended from the branches. Women soar into a bright blue sky with drifting clouds and a jagged black and white field scrolling up the screen. There?s a vast vista of intergalactic space as seen from the rings of Saturn before returning to the modern world, where the female character negotiates a backdrop of rotating metal gears, and finally the closure of a classical marble promenade.
David Niles does not talk about the meaning of his work?he operates visually and accordingly, there?s nothing literal about Vic Noir (though it hints at literature). ?It?s this idea of liberating Victorian dress. I love the idea of contrast,? Niles says. It strives to be otherworldly and outlandish without the intention of illustrating anything specifically Victorian. When you pause for a moment and truly look, everything suddenly seems out of the ordinary. P