José Andrés Mora works with display methods to affect the connotation of written language. Through sculptural installations, Mora experiments with texts to juxtapose their intimate connotation with the impersonal aesthetics of their display mechanisms.
In Scanner, two strings of words converge and diverge on the walls of the gallery space – in turn this creates a loop that collapses and confuses the alternating narrative points of view in each text. Moving clockwise, moving apart, and moving until returning to a tangent, the installation cycles through events that connect and disconnect at different narrative points.
Two projectors form this wave-like path by casting the image of each text from opposing ground/ceiling platforms. These platforms rotate to carry the synchronous clockwise motion; inside each projected image, the text scrolls counterclockwise to produce a negative interference that arrests the text’s motion on the wall.
Using these parameters, Mora sets out to affect the reading conditions for the text in Scanner. Employing the clockwise motion of the platforms, as well as the limited size of the projection windows, Scanner confuses the reader’s memory of past events in the two simultaneous narrations.