About This Artwork

Diana Thater
American, born 1962

Delphine, 1999

Five-channel digital color video, sound (projection) with nine-monitor cube, light filters, and existing architecture; continuous loop
Artist's proof from an edition of three
Donna and Howard Stone New Media Fund, 2005.93

© 2005 Diana Thater

Delphine is a landmark work of light projection, a moving-image and color environ-ment created by California-based artist Diana Thater. Widely recognized as a pioneer of video art as installation, Thater is best known for work featuring images of animals (bees, horses, wolves) that have been described as “models of other subjectivities.” Thater has stated, “I think about nature and sculpt with images of space. I ask questions about reconstructing subjectivity, using nature and sometimes animals as my models.” In Delphine, which takes as its primary subject matter wild dolphins interacting with humans, the artist worked for the very first time with untrained animals in their natural habitat. Thater chose dolphins because, as she put it, “I wanted to work with fluidity and sometimes the simplest solutions are the most obvious.”

Complex spatial thinking is key to Thater’s project; she understands video installation as a dialogue between sculpture and architecture. Projected on a large scale––onto entire ceilings, walls, and floors—her work thoroughly transforms the physical realities and architectural idiosyncrasies of the spaces it inhabits. This generic and spatial fluidity also blurs conventional boundaries between the work and the viewer.

The artist also insists on revealing, through the construction of her works themselves, how images are made and the conditions in which they are presented. Delphine, for instance, was shot with four pieces of equipment simultaneously: scuba divers held two digital video cameras, and two Super 8 cameras were used by crew members wearing only snorkel gear. Thus the shots from the bottom looking up are all on video, and the shots from the top looking down are all on film. These were intercut without regard for separating the different media; film and video are both visible. Clarity and atmosphere, grain and line flow into one another, and the perceived immediacy and flatness of video and the perceived memory and depth of film give way to and mutually reinforce or deconstruct one another. These self-conscious production methods are mirrored by Thater’s particular aesthetic of presentation: she always leaves the equipment in full view inside the installation. This transparent approach, the artist insisted, “does not, as some people might have us believe, preclude transcendence. This is ultimately my point––that neither magic or superficial beauty is required to approach the sublime.”