Predictable Contact
2017
Video Installation
Edition of 3 plus AP
“Michael Hanna operates at the edges of our conscious minds, laying out new pathways of affective experience. His work takes many forms, from text-based sculpture, to video and immersive environments with site-specific and responsive installation. He factors in disruptions to our ways of seeing and processing information, how things operate – a spanner in the works; a glitch, an occlusion, hypervisibility, overstimulation, dissociation, temporal slippage. To what end? To tease out new lines of relation between sensory experience, psychology and society. His work sets in motion open questions about how our behaviour can be altered at micro and macro levels; how we make sense of the world.
Drawing from scientific methodologies of classification, Predictable Contact (2017), at Naughton Gallery, Belfast, is a multi-channel video installation bathed in a synthetic magenta twilight. 32 microfilms focusing on optical perception are projected on the wall at a scale stretched beyond scientific testing standards. The uniform magenta colouration – a colour Hanna drew from the space and amplified sensorially – dissolves further the optical distinctions between each microfilm. It is generally accepted that the human brain can store around seven items in our short-term memory, plus or minus two. The eye cannot take in all 32 microfilms at once, so focus waxes and wanes. And we can retain only a fraction of what we see. The work puts forth an affective sensory experience to test the limits of the visible and the perceptible in a given moment.”