Nicola Schauerman:
Interactive video installation
Becoming starfish
Philippe Boissonet, who I had met in Buenos Aires, told me he was showing work in a London group show. I would find it interesting, he said. Now I see why. Electric Blue is an animated, interactive exhibition of 31 artist’s installations. Four floors of photographs, paintings, sculptures, sound works, screenings, a hologram and a live puppet performance, demonstrate different ways artists are engaging audiences with their ideas.
At the Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, until March 30, this show really is worth the effort to find. Tucked away behind the Oxo Tower building, there was no signage guiding me to it. According to a passer-by, the Bargehouse is an old building that has only recently been made available for artist’s events at a very low rent.
Here I will briefly describe just some of the work I found interesting.
On entering the building, a field of yellow helium balloons appears, like the proverbial daffodils: Tina Bech’s Floating Field. Each balloon is held by a string equipped with a tiny motion sensor, and suspended from a small patch of green plastic ‘grass’ on the floor. Each balloon is held down by a small mp3 player. Your motion through the field triggers the sounds of birds – a different call for each balloon. I liked the sweet simplicity, and playfulness of this piece. It allowed you to create your own sound compositions, through your body motion. It got me thinking about ways people might engage with the voices of Antarctic expeditioners, through physical movement.
Imagined Future Evolutions, by Nicola Schauerman, also caught my eye. Here are animated creatures like amoebas, projected onto surfaces, one upwards from below into a round pool-like tabletop, and the other onto a tall wall. Both move as if initiated by my movement in the space, choreographed before my eyes. In Becoming Starfish, the motion of the five arms looks human, maneuvering a body of many breasts. Their gestures suggest that each limb is driven by its own thought, like a human at odds with itself, but five-fold!
Bea Denton’s installation, Modern-Day-Miracles , includes a series of ‘lenticular’ portraits – photographs of people whose mouths appear to move when you walk past them. They reminded me of a brooch I had in the 1950’s of the Queen and the Duke of England. Turning its flat surface one way I could see the Queen, and turning it the other way, I saw the Duke. Modern-Day-Miracles evolved from collecting stories of people talking about miraculous things they have witnessed. People contibuted their stories on-line and off-line, offering listeners different ideas of what a miracle might be.
Nature of Visual Process, is an installation of prints and written documentation of some research by Robin Hawes. Working in collaboration with scientists Dr. Tim hodgson and , into how differently we all perceive the physical world. Working with research scientists, he produced diagrams mapping the pathways of people’s eyes scanning an artwork for 10 seconds, and composed visual representations of what they saw using photomanipulartion. His work demonstrates how differently we scan and visually interpret physical reality, depending on what we are predisposed to see:
Reality for each of us is then, is relative. Relative both to our (species specific) evolutionary history, as well as our own personal (organism specific) history of life experience.
…each viewer gathers only a partial portion of the image over ten seconds, revealing an idiosynchratic and unique pattern of exploration at the point of focus. The result is a cumulative record of the individual’s actual experience of the art work.
Whilst our brains fool us into thinking that we are all looking at the same artwork, each of us gathers and constructs our own unique internal artwork.
This kind of research could dovetail nicely with understanding Antarctic representations. If you took people down there, uninformed, Antarctica’s landscape could be a clear slate upon which to chart their perceptions. But this could be a harsh experiment. Being informed is necessary for physical and psychological survival.
David Strang’s Tiny Moments was promoted as an “Ice, Sound and Light Installation”, but it was difficult to see the ice in the dark room where it glowed. Like a star field, tiny dots of whiteness suspended from above were bathed in ultraviolet light. They gently move as you pass by. As with the Floating Field, this connected me to the work. Our bodies shared the space.
Philippe Boissonet’s The Awareness of Limits: Galileo (1993) installation involves holograms, plexiglass, lights and an ultrasonic system for interactive pressure detection. Two oval sheets of plexiglass, one transluscent white, one transluscent black, are mounted on separate tripods face to face. Into the white oval, a hologram of Earth appears. You can see it more distinclty as you move around it. You see it through a flat surface, much as you can only see it from your sitting room, watching TV. But a hologram is four dimensional. Moving around, you see it in the round. This piece engaged me physically, and so I felt a strong connection with the orb. It was like looking through a window at the real thing.