Hi,

Thanks Simon for your 'inside information' on curating that show (see
below) - it's just the kind of information useful to other curators.
I'm keen to hear more about the details of feedback about that show,
whether personal or formal:

Do you think that there is an age difference in how people might
respond to big busy spaces vs. more intimate ones? Do you think the
NMPFTV context of also having educational hands-on exhibits in other
parts of the building helped or hindered? Was there any confusion
between interpretational technology and art technology? (I'm thinking
here of Susan Collin's Audio Zone artwork in the V-Topia show in
Glasgow, 1995; a piece using infra-red headphones which some people
mistook for 'a guide to the exhibition' but which was a rather
creative confusion.)

You also get the CRUMB choccy biccy award for being open about
aspects which maybe didn't work so well  - could you say a little
more about what kind of critical feedback from which kind of
visitors?  You can withhold names to protect the innocent.

cheers,

Beryl


>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 Biggs
>London GB
>
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>http://hosted.simonbiggs.easynet.co.uk/

_________________________________________________________
Beryl Graham.
Post Doctoral Research Fellow in New Media, University of Sunderland
tel: +44 (0)191 233 1098  email:  [log in to unmask]
web page: http://www.stare.com/beryl/   OR
http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~as0bgr/welcome.html