Hyperbola Blue by John Dalterio

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© John Dalterio

John Dalterio is an American photo, video, and installation artist based in Boston, Massachusetts. His main interests include narrative, perception, and simulation. His photographs have been published in a variety of online galleries and exhibited in print form across Massachusetts and Connecticut, and his most recent installations have been shown in the Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston’s SOWA district, and Gallery South in Cambridge, MA.
Website: http://johndalterio.com/

 

Hyperbola Blue is a project that sits somewhere between the traditional photobook and a choose your own adventure game. It uses the flexibility and language of the internet to offer the viewer choice in how he or she progresses through the sequence of webpages I’ve arranged. As a user travels through this branching narrative structure he or she must navigate dead ends, reroutes, and intersections of the overarching storyline, thus implicating the viewer as partial creator of his or her own experience.

On the eleventh of August I moved into a new house. That night, while sitting on the porch watching the moon through a crawling veil of clouds, I noticed a person standing in a window across the way. It was hard to tell by moonlight, but I felt he was looking at me.

Psychic staring effect is a phenomenon in which humans detect being watched by extrasensory means. It is usually indicated by a tingling feeling on the back of the neck – I felt it then. I watched as he lingered in the window motionless, as was I.

The clouds kept crawling until the sky was empty, and in a moment he disappeared into the deep blue of what I imagine to be his bedroom. I returned to the sky, though I kept his window in the corner of my eye, and at one point, when the moon had slipped out of sight and the only light was that of the man’s room, I began to wonder what glowed on the other side of the wall.

Link to Hyperbola Blue

Hyperbola Blue Video Tour
(10:52 minute silent video)
This video walks the viewer through the navigation of Hyperbola Blue