Michael Szpakowski describes his installation as "a dream diary... constructed from small personal artefacts - both digital and physical - collected from [my] life and surroundings."
It consists of a vertical white oblong with a digital screen on the front near the top, below which an odd assortment of objects is displayed on two shelves and a white plinth: a dark pebble, a black-and-white family photograph in a frame, an educational picture-book for children ("What to Look for in Autumn"), and so forth. The white block is decorated with a branching trail of pressed flowers: pansies, violets, geraniums, buttercups and daisies. The overall effect of the installation is undemonstrative and domestic. It's almost as if you were looking at a television in someone else's front room, a television surrounded by someone else's bric-a-brac. This effect is strengthened by the fact that the objects on the shelves and the plinth seem old, valueless, slightly shabby, yet potentially charged with someone else's personal associations.
If you're in someone else's living-room with the television on, your eye keeps being dragged back to the screen: and that's what happens here, too. The screen in this case shows several different things simultaneously: a looped movie of a middle-aged man, breathing onto the camera-lens to mist it over; a slow-changing sequence of stills (many of them showing the same middle-aged man in various postures and situations); an enigmatic shot of a back garden (silhouetted wall, sky, the top fringe of a tree); and, in the top left-hand corner of the screen, a montage of very short movies. The white spaces in between these images all show the same constantly-running text animation, entitled "Jeremiad", and based on the following lines from Jeremiah: "Then I said I will not make mention of him nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones."
Just as the screen drags your attention away from the objects on the shelves and the plinth, so the sequence of QuickTime movies in the top left-hand corner of the screen drags your attention away from the rest. But the movies themselves are difficult to interpret. Leaves arranging themselves into the contours of a man's face. An animation made from children's drawings. A branch of cherry-blossom in a vase of water. What's going on? What does it all mean?
Gradually, if you spend some time in front of the piece, common denominators start to emerge. The same sense of bric-a-brac charged with personal associations which emanates from the objects on the shelves and the plinth comes across from the on-screen material too. Then you start to notice that some of the things on the shelves reappear on-screen - the cactus, the family photograph, the arrangement of pressed flowers. And that middle-aged man whose face is shown over and over again - surely that must be the artist, or someone close to him? You start to get a sense that the relationship between the "real" objects in the display and the material on-screen is rather like that between familiar objects in the "real" world and the thoughts and memories in our heads. Once this idea has occurred to you your attention is redistributed, so that you're no longer focussing just on the digital screen, but on the installation as a whole.