The installation Salt Lake is a research project concerning the influence of information and the media on our everyday lives. The need to win the ‘communications battle’ encourages the commercial media, the authorities, institutions and individuals to swamp us with audiovisual material. We are presented with this visual, auditory and iconographical corpus as a single large archive, fully searchable, without intellectual, ethical, or moral limitations, in a universal language to be interpreted and recycled by all. This accessibility stimulates reflection on a number of issues. Is the internet a simple window on the world as it is, or an image of the world as created by the internet and its users themselves? Does this complete access to material that has hitherto been kept secret or exclusive - at the same time beautiful and terrible to see - help us to build our own memories and through its duality create new personalities for us and our children? Do the media and the internet really influence our mental and physical states?

Salt Lake investigates these subjects. It is an ‘immersive machine’ that reacts to the spectators’ physical presence as they enter this excess of audiovisual information. Salt Lake is meant to cause indigestion, nausea, image overkill, so that the spectators can rediscover themselves as they reach the end of their journey through media inferno. Totally isolated in the void where they can reflect on their own existence.

Salt Lake, by Tom Heene and Yacine Sebti, will be shown at Almost Cinema, Vooruit, Gent, 10-20 October 2007! Tom and Yacine will present Salt Lake at the International Meeting of Performing Arts IETM from 4 to 7 October at Vooruit, Ghent.