Disturbance (among the jars) 1988

Directed by Gary Hill

Disturbance (among the jars) is a multi-lingual adaptation of selected Gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945/46. The structure of the piece is based around the metaphor of fragmentation, more specifically, that of a broken sentence reflecting the original condition of many of the texts. In a completely white room lit with several thousand watts of light, a veranda with seven straight-back wooden chairs faces a low pedestal of the same height on which seven 27-inch bare cathode ray tubes (display bulbs of video monitors) are positioned to form a fragmented line. The positions of the monitors can be seen in a multiplicity of ways.