Andrew Norman Wilson
Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome







Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments.The work’s subtitle, Lavender Town Syndrome, is named for a conspiracy theory in which more than 200 Japanese children were driven to suicide by a particular board in the game Pokémon Red and Green for Game Boy. Many others suffered serious migraines or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away. Some cried until they started vomiting. These incidents were later determined to have been caused by the unsettling background music in Lavender Town, which, aside from containing a high tone undetectable to adult ears, was also an early experiment in binaural beats which are said to affect human behavior by syncing with listeners’ brainwaves.
Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome is one of three works that form the backstory of an ongoing project: a metafictional documentary about a group of artists who eventually drop out of the contemporary art world to pursue more socially productive design projects. In making these works, Wilson is interested in the role that technology plays in amplifying the impact of “truthiness” over truth. As sound, images, objects, computation, and bodies interrelate, they offer possibilities for intermedial imprints that provoke surprising new effects and complicated meanings.