Grandma's house | daniel-pillis

GRANDMA'S HOUSE

Living Room Installation, entire contents of original room reinterpreted

From September 2013 to August 2014, I lived and performed my life inside a re-installation of my grandmother's New Jersey home in Pittsburgh PA.

I emptied her house as our family prepared to move her into a nursing home, and I brought several U-haul trucks filled with all her belongings to an empty house in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

I had few personal belongings other than the inherited contents of my grandmother. She had begun to develop signs of alzheimer's and was unfortunately forced to live in a small room in a nursing home.

I gave semi-weekly tea parties where I gave performances based on home movies. Each was unique and spontaneous for the guests.

Each evening I had the choice to sleep in my grandmothers bed or a bedroom filled with my childhood belongings.

The project was an experiment in how media and memory are intertwined, how life is re-mediated by the methods we use to capture it, and how we are formed as a result of our environment, objects, belonging and family.

I took several thousand digital photographs over and over again, daily, of the rooms and objects.

I created an associative 3D space out of these several thousand photographs, and mapped it out in 3D to resemble the orientation of the original architecture.

Using video processing software, I was able to extract a motion path that followed the handheld camera movements of my grandmothers old home videos, as she followed me as a child giving a tour of the house.

Placing this motion data on a virtual camera, the footage above was produced, a digital home video combining my grandmothers perspective with the modern incarnation of the space.

Dining Room Installation, entire contents of original room reinterpreted