Last night I went to watch a dance performance, not knowing much about it beforehand. Approaching the venue, I recognised a scene familiar from my past.
Some years ago in a Hobart theatre I was ushered towards the door as if I was a prisoner. The audience were being led by actor wardens into a panoptikon. This was an experimental piece of theatre.
Last night I was ushered towards a reception desk, as a patient waiting for some spoof psychological testing. Audience members, apart from me, were all invited and willing. I had come unknowingly, and I felt extremely uncomfortable.
The experience of ill-ease, and of having to physically walk away, made me think how artists dream things up that are not every body’s cup of tea.
We create imaginative spaces and invite people to enter into them. These spaces are not always comfortable for everyone.
I’m inviting expeditioners and artists to to visit this site and to contribute.
Only some have responded, and they have done so generously and enthusiastically. I need to meet them and explain as much as possible what will happen to what they share with me. There needs to be a lot of trust on their side, as I really can’t say exactly what I’ll do. I,m experimenting and inventing things. I cannot know myself the imaginative space I want to make for viewers to enter into until it is made. This is the nature of art making, and of improvisation. We discover by doing, by working with materials, ideas and the technology that is at hand.
Animating takes time. Working with the material I have collected and been given, it will be a while before something of interest develops.
Until there are more animations on the site, people will not see the space I am hoping to make.
At the moment I’m animating sea level data collected in Brisbane, between 1920 and 200.
Animating this data is different from making yesterday’s objects. I hope to be able to explain how they are different when I have made something I’m happy to show.
What it means to be working with other people’s material is something I’ll have more to say about too.
.
…a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.” In his own words, Bentham described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”[1]
I have been in a position where the project relied upon the empathic ability of the individual to get its point across. It was a most distressing experience. I am now hyper-aware of being manipulated in such a way, my flight response has been activated. If I had been with you I would have left, my past experience having been relived in seconds. I also find some movies try to manipulate the viewer in a similar way and become rather angry and offended.
I am becoming more interested in the viewer in the space and how they see the work. Given this experience of being manipulated, I am aware of respecting my audience. This understanding of respect of the viewer will grow.
I was talking yesterday with Geoffery Payne (Number 47 Rylstone) about how putting together exhibitions should be getting easier and less stressful but aren’t. He suggested that it may be because you know more and are taking more things into consideration.
Yes. That’s an interesting issue.
We manipulate people’s perceptions whenever we invite them into our imagined spaces.
We fabricate, we make believe.
Another dimension worth considering is related to the poetics of the network. The space in which you are writing. In my limited experience of this space over the last 10 years there is a form of entropy which propels all of us towards what has been referred to as the ‘flesh’ meeting. I understand this a a kind of slow motion drift towards actually meeting Christine ‘in the flesh’ – nothing sleazy just a physical meeting during which we will share a range of non-verbal gestural communications that may (or may not) set us up for further – deeper forms of communication. The fact is that the body is important regardless of how we might think of it superficially as an extension of a lump of ego…
This is why we commit our words and thoughts to the space. We want to move towards this meeting – inevitably, eventually, inexorably arriving – face-to-face.
Christine, next time you go to Rylstone call in and introduce yourself to Sheila Carroll at Ilford House (Sandstone House behind the turnoff). I’m sure you will be delighted and so will she.