Dear list
I thought you might be interested in the first major digital art commission from London’s Wellcome Collection, Chris Dorley-Brown’s ‘15 Seconds part 3’
http://15seconds.wellcomecollection.org/
‘15 Seconds part 3’ is a tantalising glimpse into lives of 26 millennials born in the 1980s, and the ways in which their lives have changed between childhood and adulthood.
In 1994, several hundred Colchester schoolchildren aged 8-11 were invited to make a video portrait of themselves and experience their ‘fifteen seconds of fame’. Ten years later, Dorley-Brown tracked down some of the individual participants to find out how their lives had progressed; and in 2014 he made a third series of video portraits. Brought together as a digital online artwork, the participants' three selves now enter into a dialogue with each other.
The first set of video portraits were made in an era before the internet became a part of everyday life; the last set were made in the era when self-presentation through social media is ubiquitous. In between are a poignant series of moving portraits that address growing up, thwarted ambition and finding out what makes you happy in life.
There are a few things about this project that might be interesting in a CRUMB context…
*) It’s Wellcome Collection’s first major digital commission that isn’t directly connected to our gallery programme. Previous digital art commissions like Šejla Kameriæ’s ‘Ab uno disce omnes’ (http://abunodisceomnes.wellcomecollection.org) have been linked to the events or exhibitions. For us to commission digital art is in some ways a leap of faith that we have an engaged audience beyond the reach of our venue for something other than our digitised collections.
*) It’s been my own first really successful project that involved working with an artist and a digital developer together. Chris’s concept was expertly engineered and implemented by a front end developer, Danielle Huntrods. Previous projects that involved interdisciplinary negotiation (eg between design-oriented artists and UX-oriented digital professionals) have not always been so successful. I’d be very interested in hearing other’s experiences of this kind of development process, where digital artworks are realised through partnerships organised by a museum or gallery.
*) ‘15 Seconds part 3’ is also interesting in that as a video portrait project its separate parts have been realised in a number of different media forms. The first iteration in 1994 was as a community video arts project, the second in 2004 produced a gallery installation, and 2014/15’s version is an online digital art commission. We don’t yet know what 2024’s version might look like(!) A solid thread of video portraiture runs through each iteration of the work, but each medium brings its own affordances (a modicum of interactivity in part 3 allows you to pause and play the portraits in different eras) in response to the demands of more material and complexity.
I’d really love to hear the list’s reflection or thoughts on the work.
Danny
Danny Birchall
Digital Manager, Wellcome Collection
Wellcome Trust
Gibbs Building
215 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK
Tele: +44 (0) 207 611 8894
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www.wellcomecollection.org<http://www.wellcomecollection.org> / @ExploreWellcome
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