Empyrean is a digital polyptych recalling the form of 15th-century Northern European altarpieces. Cliff Evans uses digital photomontage animation in place of painting to create a loose narrative around the subjects of baptism, repetition, and return, while focusing on the issues of power and population control. Empyrean’s central theme is developed through an absurd juxtaposition of both benign traditions and disturbing pathologies: wellness tourism, missionary practice, and militaristic domination.

“Empyrean” functions as five channel synchronized video — each channel being 720p High Definition video stream. For such a demanding task, we will build a highly optimized open-PLAYER system, with carefully chosen hardware components and our software for encoding and playback of multichannel video streams. All software is Open Source …

Installation view and link: