One problem is the sound. A number of the QuickTime movies have soundtracks, but you have to get really close before you start to notice them, and no matter how close you get it's almost impossible to hear them properly. This problem is aggravated by the fact that the installation is set in an echoey hall, along with several other new media pieces with (louder) soundtracks of their own.
Another problem is the fact that the piece isn't interactive, and doesn't have any other obvious strategy for catching and holding people's attention. It helps if you know that the middle-aged man whose face keeps appearing on-screen is Michael himself, that he was born and brought up in Sheffield, and so forth. It also helps if you've seen some of the QuickTime movies before. I watched several people without these advantages come into the hall, glance at the installation, and then move on, obviously unable to get to grips with it.
But in some ways a more attention-grabbing piece would have been untrue to the spirit of what Michael is trying to convey, not only here but in much of his work elsewhere. The feeling is intensely personal, reflective, and although there are several distinct themes in his work - nature, time, history, family and travel - what he keeps coming back to is the nature of his own experience, what it feels like to be himself, how his internal life relates to the world in which he finds himself. He keeps crossing and recrossing the boundaries between memory and the here-and-now, between feeling and observation, between emotionally-charged symbols and matter-of-fact objects. Although he has strong political views and a powerful sense of European history, much of his work is small-scale and unemphatic, without any obvious topical references, built from the minutiae of his everyday life. But this is not to say that it lacks intensity. On the contrary, the text which forms the basis of "Jeremiad", which is constantly on-screen in one form or another and thus sets the tone for the whole installation, suggests that what he has done here amounts to a kind of declaration of faith - "his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones". At its best, Michael's work has this kind of power. It takes apparently-trivial things and transforms them. It presents us with a fragmented but highly-charged impression of what it's like to be a human being.
[ Edward Picot, Editor, The Hyperliterature Exchange ]