Bakery projection – December 2008.
Here are a couple of quicktime movies of our projection at the Bakery in Northbridge, Perth, on the 19 December 2008. Electronic sound from Hidden Shoal Recordings accompanied the work.
Projection at the Bakery
There will be a one-night projection at the Bakery Gallery in Northbridge on the 19 December. We plan to project various Perth sites and include the viewer into the work via real-time projection. This is our attempt to construct a reflexive space in which the audience can see themselves within the projection. By seeing themselves, there is a different level of engagement with the work, and it ceases to be only a passive experience, into we hope, a transformative one.
ACUADS – Figures mag
We (Stuart and I) presented a paper at ACUADS (Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools) entitled “Figures: the social in the visual – a context centred graphical news magazine”.
In particular we showed our first tangible output, a book of postcards. We also presented documentation at Spectrum Project Space, where we set the work up, displayed on a large screen in the gallery window, so passers by could view images of the postcards.
To have a look, visit the Figures website where there is already some postings regarding the work:
the situationists, locative media and Figures: The social in the visual
Locative media has a strong relationship with the situationist’s derive. Michele Chang (2003), discussing her collaborative locative media project ‘Asphalt Games’ stated that they were “inspired by the Situationist techniques of derive and detournement”. This has much potential for extending physical/virtual sites and for incorporating into “Figures: the social in the visual”. To have a loo at the site, visit http://figuresmag.com/
We are currently working on locative media strategies, updates will be following.
Locative Media
Locative media has much similarities with the situationists.
Locative media is a technological system related to urban space where the particpant/user can move in physical space while negotiating with the media. Located art therefore, is the art of media and wireless systems, as is the case with the UK’s locative media group, Blast Theory. They utilise digital and wireless technologies to make interactive performances and video work encouraging critical discussion. Their current work developed form Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), is Rider Spoke (2007-2008) where the audience cycles through a city holding a computer looking for a discreet place to record a message, the data is then stored and they go and hunt for other participants messages. As they state:
“The piece continues Blast Theory’s fascination with how games and new communication technologies are creating new social spaces…It invites the public to be co-authors of the piece and a visible manifestation of it as they cycle through the city. It locates the venue precisely in its local context and invites the audience to explore that context for its emotional and intellectual resonances”.
To see Rider Spoke, visit:
Figures: the social in the visual
I am currently collaborating on an online/offline news magazine Figures: the social in the visual with a colleague, Stuart Medley and research assistant Uriah Matthews. Our proposal seeks to bridge the gap between art and design in visual arts and graphic design. Our research examines the potential for visuality to reconfigure news information.
This collaboration explores what Jeffery P. Jones has termed alternative media through spaces of interpretation and communication away from mainstream notions of news, information and public space. The key idea is to visualise data as a communicative tool through which to expose inequalities as a function of globalisation. Our research interests lie in exploring ‘alternative media’ spaces of interpretation and communication away from mainstream notions of news, information and public space.
We propose that globalised contexts demand alternative communicative spaces to mainstream media that allow diversity, plurality, intersubjectivity and new forms of interrogation. Combining our backgrounds in graphics and visual art respectively, we are attempting to provide a social application for visuality – a visual device to display socially orientated material.
Public sphere, Guangzhou
This is the site that we are aiming to work with. It is at the far end of Sun Yat Sen University overlooking the river.
webcam ideas for a future exhibition in Guangzhou
We are attempting to organise an exhibition between Guangzhou and Perth utilising webcam and projection. This would allow issues of globalisation, incommensurability and digital technologies, Internet and webcam, to be realised in a different way than I have done previously. It would also concur with the point Lev Manovich asserts in The Language of New Media, “the idea of content preexisting interfaces challenged in yet another way by new media artworks that dynamically generate their data in real time” (p.67).
This is why the webcam is so important as it is not predetermined.
Ideas generated from “Between Cultures”
The exhibition “Between Cultures” has provided many possibilities for creative works linking Perth and Guangzhou. Specifically investigating the stark differences of the use of public space. Building on the work of Physical/Virtual and webcams, we are investigating how we could have live webcam images projected in Perth and live Perth images projected in Guangzhou. This is hoped to start a dialogue around the public sphere and how this differs from one geographical location to another.
The use of the public sphere in Guangzhou is in direct contrast to the Cultural Centre in Perth. At one end of Sun Yat Sen University before the river is a public space that the Guangzhou community use extensively, for dancing, cycling, performing martial arts and general socialising. As many of the contributors to Physical/Virtual Sites stated, the Perth cultural centre is “the dead heart of the city”; and “there is no culture here”.
We have contacts with the Anthropolgy Department at Sun Yat Sen University, and hope to liase with them regarding collaboration, and future research.
