This project is an audio and lighting re-creation of Felix Gonzalex-Torres’s legendary installation “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” which consists of a pile of candies which individually wrapped in multicolored cellophane. This installation is an allegorical portrait of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991. The pile of the 175 pounds of candy represents Laycocl’s ideal body weight. The visitors are invited to take a piece of candy. The disappearing pile parallels to Laycock’s weight loss and metaphors the diminishing life. 

Gonzalex-Torres’s art practice was, according to some scholars, related to Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theater, in which “creative expression transforms the spectator from an inert receiver to an active, reflective observer and motivates social action”. To articulate such interaction and involvement and using them as the framework for the re-creation process of a spiritual multi-media installation I connect the volume of the candy pile directly to the representation of the audio and the light. 

While the generative ambient environment sound will stay playing forever, the main audio features with the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch reading the poem "Ode to a Nightingale". This romantic poem written by John Keats also explores the wonder of life and death. In the poem, Keats relates the life’s sufferings to the briefness of the bird’s song which reveals another layer of parallel relation to the diminishing life.

The physical design of this piece follows the original setting of Gonzalex-Torres’s work, however, by redesigning the lighting environment the visitors will able to focus more on the audio contents and gain a more immersive and meditative experience of life and death.

Full experience download: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xrojxddQWAiUNP9Vfxk5sRSVxGb0_WPv