Title: REFLECTIONS
Year: 1998/2000
Type: Interactive Video Installation

Reflections is an interactive video installation that uses a mirror partially erased, a tv monitor, a video camera and a digital image mixer in order to combine the images of the users and the news images of a bomb that exploded in April 1993 in Bogota, Colombia, a block away from me, killing 36 people and wounding 200 more.

Being a witness to the destruction, the flames and the pain left a deep impression in my mind. Once you see the burning bodies in the real world, you realize that whenever they are shown on TV, they are also real. The pain is real, the flames are real. The inside the monitor images are taken from the breaking news report, an hour after the bomb exploded.

Inspired by Jim Campbell's Hallucination, this video installation forces the user to become part of the images of the tragedy. The safety of the television is gone.

Here is a first section of pictures from the original installation in 1997, followed by a split screen version made later in 2000. And here is a link to the text that accompanied the installation.

This is a paper I wrote about the nature of interactivity studying this installation

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