The Past Is A Ghost

SPACE is pleased to present The Past Is A Ghost, a collaborative installation by Zach Poff and N.B.Aldrich, on view in our storefront gallery.

Originally developed for the Soundmarks exhibition at Art Interactive, The Past Is A Ghost is an interactive video installation for public spaces that was designed to test the aptitude of virtual transformation for transcendent experience. The idea of existing in, or contributing to, the localized stream of historical progression is at the heart of The Past Is A Ghost. A TV monitor shines out, showing a live surveillance image of passing pedestrians and the surrounding street scene, evidence of the here and now. When a passerby stops to observe the monitor, the background fades away and the viewer is cast into a compressed virtual history, rendered into the ghosted past of the camera’s collected observations. 

Zach Poff + N.B.Aldrich have been collaborating for the past five years creating audio, video, performance and installation work primarily in the areas of media and New Media. Their work has been shown at Artists Space, Art Interactive, the Not Still Art Festival, the Optical Festival, Perform.Media, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Bates College Museum of Art, the Polli Talu Arts Center, and on-line at SoundLAB, among others. Aldrich currently teaches in the New Media Department at University of Maine, Orono. Poff is an instructor and technical assistant for film/video at the Cooper Union School of Art.