Beryl wrote:
Thanks for this interesting thread - the tension between group and
individual use of interactive artworks in gallery contexts is a particular
interest of mine. In arranging a show, the tendency is often to go for
the "Brothel effect" of individual private rooms off of some kind of common
space. Other organisations have played interesting games with the ideas of
using the artworks to get people to interact with each other in a larger
space, such as Toshio Iwai's "Resonance of 4" or an interesting card
playing game in the New Metropolis Museum in Amsterdam.
I'd be interested to hear about other such group tactics,
-----
When we (myself and Malcolm Ferris, supported by Hannah Redler) put
together the digital galleries at the National Museum of Photography, Film
and Television in Bradford (UK) we decided to go for a transparent
relationship between the individual works. Literally, this meant that all
the works were, in so far as it was possible, visually transparent such
that you could see most pieces from any location in the galleries. You
could see through the works (eg: projections were onto transparent
surfaces, structures were made of grids or perforated materials rather than
solid surfaces, etc).
In practice it was not that easy to achieve, but in the end we came up with
a working compromise. This meant that each individual artist had to accept
that their work was not the most important thing, that it was a part of a
larger integrated project. This included work from artists such as Toshio
Iwai, Paul Sermon, Jeffrey Shaw, Jane Prophet and Joachem Sauter. They all
(bravely) took this on board and we avoided what you call the "brothel"
effect. Aside from artworks we also included in the same space other
exhibits dealing with the development of technology (eg: user interfaces,
digital imaging, etc), special effects and cinema and a large area
dedicated to computer games (including a large multi-user Quake space,
integrated into the gallery and the exhibits around it and where the
virtual Quake scenario was a model of the gallery and its exhibits, thus
turning the whole thing inside out). This had a profound effect on the
nature of the audience engagement with the projects as people immediately
accepted high levels of physical engagement with everything around them. A
cinema projection was treated to a degree like a computer game, for
example. Anyway, something resembling what we originally did is still on
show at the NMPFT, so a measure of evidence is there to see.
As curators we were looking to create an environment that reflected an
overloaded polyphonic recursive and chaotic information space, where
information was everywhere yet transparent, like light itself...this was
our vision of the information society. Given this objective it was obvious
that this was the approach to take. But if our agenda had been different
(eg: to survey the best of new media art and present it as sympathetically
as possible to each project) then this approach would have been a disaster.
Given some of the critical feedback I have had some visitors clearly think
that what we did at the NMPFT was a disaster anyway...but that's another
story...;)
Simon
Simon Biggs
London GB
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http://hosted.simonbiggs.easynet.co.uk/
Research Professor
Art and Design Research Centre
School of Cultural Studies
Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield, UK
http://www.shu.ac.uk/
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