Pacing back and forth

From crackling fire to children playing on a dock, Elizabeth Knipe's "The Pace" lends her long-term memory to a camera lens.

This interactive video exhibition is currently on display at the Squeaky Wheel. Pictures and text create the effect of being inside Knipe's head while streams of video illustrate her observations throughout a day-to-day grind.

"The idea for 'The Pace' grew out of my research interests concerning interactive digital poetry," Knipe said. "I wanted to create a piece that required movement beyond the expected hand/mouse combination, something at the level of the body."

Knipe's inspiration for "The Pace" was drawn from a two-day performance stunt she pulled in October of 2005.

"I walked all around Buffalo allowing the dirt and grime of the city to sully my white clothing," Knipe said. "I had a lot of time to think during this performance and decided to use that experience as the content of this piece."

The phrases used throughout the film do very little to explain or give meaning to the piece. With no direct correlation to immediate clips shown on the screen, the text merely adds to the confusion and one gets frustrated with during the show.

"Text features prominently in most of my work, even video pieces. I like to twine traditional page-based poems with multimedia elements to offer a more complete experience," Knipe said. "In this piece, the lines of text on the screen often relate to individual videos, but are not directly descriptive, instead they have grown out of my own response to the visual imagery."

Viewers will either get "The Pace" or resent it for being un-relatable. For some the exhibit is nothing more than pictures without meaning flashed across a screen. The text is raw and fragmented; for example, "fingers on the keyboard, on the pages, across my skin" or "held fast in corporeal memory."

Some may recognize the organized chaos of the mind's infrastructure through Knipe's sprawling messages.

"It's definitely getting moments into her personal life. Through it, I have access to her personal world," said Tammy McGovern, a fellow artist.

The exhibit challenges people to think about what they see in their daily lives.

"I think of 'The Pace' as an exterior mind-space, a visual representation of the thoughts and emotions and memories that spring forth when one is pacing about a room," Knipe said. "I hope these things resonate with my viewers and that, though they may feel like they're voyeurs in my head, similar thoughts come to them."

Overall, "The Pace" is an invitation for confusion, with no definitive structure or to the stacks of words and pictures. The images do nothing to encourage the viewer to glue their eyes to the screen.

The most detrimental part of this exhibition is that the viewers are not invited to interact with Knipe's piece, even though her intention was to make her personal memories relatable.

Knipe's show leaves you rifling through your memory, and that's worth being submerged in video screens and ambiguous messages. "The Pace" will run through Feb. 23. The Squeaky Wheel is open from 1 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday as well as 1 to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.