Double Vision: Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon

To enter the flickering darkness of Douglas Gordon's re-edit film, you must first pass a public warning tacked to the wall. It cautions the viewer about a condition known as photosensitive epilepsy, a stimulus-induced type of seizure most commonly triggered in children and adolescents. For those susceptible to the condition it describes - particularly those suffer from tonic-clonic, absence, complex partial, and mixed epilepsy - the filmic experience promised by the installation carries potentially dire medical consequences. Even for those without such a history, the suggestive power of the warning casts a shadow across the subsequent experience, transforming the darkened temple of traditional cinema into a twilight laboratory of human consciousness. Under the smiling benignity of a sign that seems to say "we care", Gordon preconstitutes our response to the work with the language of a psychological and medical condition. Written as a warning, the sign now functions as a predisposition - the writing clearly on the wall, the experiment on us. [excerpt from Double Vision, book]