Sarah Hatton:::

Pull My Hair and Tell Me You Love Me, 2007, reactive video installation

Pull My Hair and Tell Me You Love Me, 2007, Reactive Video, First Studio, Phoenix AZ

Pull My Hair and Tell Me You Love Me is a reactive video installation that depicts Rapunzel in a tiny tower, waiting for the people in the gallery to come and rescue her. A digital video of an empty tower window can be seen inside a physical tower structure. When someone approaches the physical tower, the video reveals Rapunzel approaching the window. She beckons someone to come and visit her and and thus climb up her hair. The viewer is helpless though, and Rapunzel becomes impatient and walks away until a new viewer comes by her tower. This piece creates an uncanny relationship between the scale of the video, the scale of the tower, and the size of the viewer. In the video, Rapunzel is the size of a story book but the tower is big enough for a small child to play inside. Most of the viewers, however, are adults, therefor the tower is not much taller than the top of the viewer’s head.

Pull My Hair… thus recreates the shifts in perception we experience when growing up, thus revealing how stories, images, objects and places in our memory can be much larger or smaller compared to reality. Pull My Hair… was presented twice in Phoenix at the Step Gallery as well as at First Studio.

Tools, scripts, software, equipment and ephimera:

Cycling 74’s Max/Jitter; Adobe Premiere; wood pedestal, foam, spray paint, PC tower; LCD monitor; web camera; cooling fans; lots of fake hair

Video of Rapunzel

PullHairDocumentation from Sarah Hatton on Vimeo.

Images of Rapunzel and the tower

Rapunzel looks out to see if anyone is there

detail of Rapunzel looking out

The web cam sits at the top and checks for gallery visiters