Points of View (1983) (Interview with Jeffery Shaw)

Jeffrey Shaw has been exploring and defining the limits of Future Cinema since the 1960s. In many of his works language operates visually. Currently he invests in large-scale custom software architectures that permit him to explore systems of dynamic fluid moving imagery in immense immersive spaces.

In this brief excerpt from a longer conversation, he discusses 'Points of View' (1983), which significantly predates his well-known navigable language work 'Legible City' (1989). In Points of View, Shaw adapted early flight simulator software to build 3D scenes of hieroglyphs which operated as protagonists; audience members were given dictionaries to understand how to read the emergent relations as they navigated. The cosmology of the work is thickened by spatially distributed voices (readings) which mixed 16 channels thru a stack of 8 stereo cassette-decks using voltage-controlled amplifiers mechanically influenced by a light source on a joystick modulating light sensors. 'Points of View' exemplifies an interactive multi-channel spatial sound-language installation constructed before the maturity of physical computing.

(Source: David Jhave Johnston, Vimeo)