Bleak and nihilistic, the work dramatizes the inevitable destruction of knowledge, ending in a dark age without hope of a renaissance.
The Long Rowing Unto Morning by Norman Lock
Unlike other of my texts for a cabinet theatre, this scenario is a wordless, poetic drama intended for video production.
Nocturne Upon St. Lucy’s Day by Norman Lock
Nocturne Upon St. Lucy’s Day, a video-installation project, belongs to that severe reduction of the theatrical event I call Cabinet Theater, where the unconscious drama in which we are both spectators and actors can be enacted.
This Most Ancient Isthmus by Norman Lock
This Most Ancient Isthmus like my In the Cellar of a Dying Star, The Balcony of the Moon, or The Descent of Light is a myth or at least an attempt in our day at myth-making.
3 Ideas of Space by Norman Lock
Central to each of the three acts comprising the installation is a narrative presented by a different voice.
In the Cellar of a Dying Star by Norman Lock
My scenarios for installation art projects, whether or not they employ video projections, are often attempts at myth-making, in a mise en scène whose spare elements are the properties of dreams.
The End of Natural History by Norman Lock
While the installation’s raison d’êtrat is despair over humankind’s “curatorial” failure to conserve habitat, it also questions the nature of the museum itself. Does an object cease to be representative when the original conditions of its existence no longer obtain? Isolated and bereft, does it become sui generis?
The Descent of Light by Norman Lock
Installation art, or cabinet theatre as I call my scenarios for it (to acknowledge a theatrical orientation inevitable for one whose early career was spent largely in writing nonrealistic plays served by stage spectacle), needs little more than an object in light – together with a narrative no matter how tenuous – to enact a drama.
The Balcony of the Moon by Norman Lock
My scenarios for video-installations emphasize their theatricality of means and, many times, ends considered more the province of the playhouse.
Where All Is Always Winter by Norman Lock
Where All Is Always Winter is my private mythology for death, of course, but also for a profound isolation where the individual is separated, perhaps irrevocably, from all else and all others.