Discussion

Here there would be a projector up high in the ceiling tilting down towards the floor. This is so that people can walk in front of it and still see the projection. Instead of having the text scrolling I think I would have it slowly fade in and out of view to avoid it looking like an advertising banner on the internet. Going for the subtle look you see... I couldn't add my text into the shadows on Google Sketch up but it would be along the skirting board at the bottom of the wall where you can see the shadows of the people and window frames.

I like the idea of using natural light rather than artificial. It means the work is more unexpected and works around existing conditionsr ather than having to create a whole new environment. The artists I have looked at use natural phenomena in their work such as Jiyeon Song and Olafur Eliasson. keeping the digital element with the projector and internet sourced text draws inspiration from Rachel Rakena's Mihi Aroha and many of Raphael Lozano-Hemmer's works.

I think the idea with the text on a skirting board is the best one. It succeeds where the others fail and meets all of the critera that I feel is necessary for the piece to work. It is the most interactive because people can walk around past it, choose their distance from the projection or choose not to have their shadow cast on it. My other concepts involved a revealing process but this could not be reversed in most of them which is something I feel is important to the work.
The idea with the charcoal would be more aesthetically appealing, and involves a really cool process but it lacks versatility and could only really be situated in a gallery for a very short time before the work had 'finished'.

If I could get hold of the right equipment and test out my original idea in a new space with a strong projector it would look a lot more finished than my other attempt. A question to do with my previous attempt at an artwork was 'Why did you use a projector?" I think it's pretty obvious that I used it for the fact that it plays with light and can be revealed by having a person's shadow cast on it. I would use an OHP but it would not have a strong enough light to be able to see the image properly. Another point was that my use of technology was extravagant. At the Elam Graduate exhibition I saw seven projectors and DVD players in one room, along with two huge flat screen TV's so I felt a little better about my own careless use of technology. When I pay over five grand for a course I think that gives me a good reason to utilise the materials available to me including electronics.

The title for my work is a phrase from a vintage poster advertising meat. I think its funny. I couldn't think of anything else appropriate, anything that alluded to interaction and projection apart from maybe the word 'you're'.

This concept allows for the best interaction, it would be situated in a public space meaning anyone could see it, not just the people who were looking for it or expecting something to be there. It is near the floor, this takes away the formality of it being an artwork. People look at the floor while walking a lot of the time and notice little things so I hope that they would notice this. This concept combines the best elements that I have thought of conceptually. It may not be the prettiest but it's visual simplicity was the most effective way of communicating the ideas I mentioned at the beginning of the blog :)

Workbook Pages

Discarded ideas
Projection similar to my other one but more suited to a public space. Projected low on the wall near the skirting board. I really like the idea of images being on the floor for some reason.. I was thinking of a location like the library, where people can quietly contemplate it and it is subtle as not to disturb people. Either that or an office building, but i think a library would reach a wider range of people (obviously in an office you would all work for the same company..).

Random brainstorm, much different to what I've been trying to focus on but worth keeping for later developments.

Charcoal idea

Experimentation with sellotape and charcoal.
This actually works far better than I thought. The visibility of the tape is still an issue and would be noticed on the white floor but the reflections would make it illegible until it became dirty with charcoal. I wet some of the paper to account for people with wet footwear and this gave a nice effect, the overall look is subtle because the white takes quite well to the charcoal I think it is the change in material and texture that would make the text stand out.
I tested this on A4 paper because I did not have a white floor or any light coloured floor.

IDEALLY>>> this installation would be as I described in an earlier post, red POSITIVE lettering on the floor with the other text written in some sort of adhesive. The source of the charcoal would be a BBQ stye mound of burnt stuff in the centre of the room, made to look like a sort of camp fire used for cooking but without untensils around to make link it closely with the cooking of meat. There would be burnt pieces of blackness scattered throughout the room to ensure that people walked through it and dragged it about the place to reveal the text.

The whole problem with this method, as with the other sellotape dirt one is that the people that first enter the installation will get the best experience. After the text is revealed it's a bit of a one liner, more like an interactive performance. The artwork would be finished in a sense because the making process, the unearthing of this amazingly thoughtful beautiful spectacular subliminal sarcastic sellotape message is the main focus of the work.

ok then.

I've just started reading NO LOGO by Naomi Klien, it's given me a lot of insight into advertising and bradning methods relative to each generation and periods of time.

Activism

A policy of taking direct and militant action to achieve a political or social goal

Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action to bring about social or political change. This action is in support of, or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument.

One who is politically active in the role of a citizen; especially, one who campaigns for change.

I'll address this issue now because it appears to have made a considerable contribution to my failure. My previous ideas about putting work in a supermarket would have been 'militant action', I did not go through with them because of this. I don't like confrontation.
I aim to bring about social awareness that may eventually lead to social change. I don't agree with the above definition that states;
"This action is in support of, or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument."
Is that to say that campaigning peacefully for things like animal rights and PEACE is controversial? People that would percieve my work as activism are people who eat meat, vegetarians find it humorous. It would be hard to set aside your personal feelings when looking at my work, if you eat meat you will think it's kind of stupid (that is the impression I got).

I am poking fun at people that eat meat, not trying to get them to stop. That would be hypocritical when my own family hunt and farm animals, I'm not going to tell them to stop doing it, I think its great that they hunt for their food. It's a personal descision what you choose to eat and I'm not about to go and preach to people my opinion of what they should and shouldn't put in their mouth, I just want to highlight issues associated with it. If I had been aware of the impact farming had on the earth, or the conditions that some animals were kept in I would have becpme vegetarian a long time ago. I just want to make the information available for people if they are curious and that is why my projection gives the viewer the CHOICE to see it or not. Even then my text is from a meat eater's perspective, only twisted slightly by changing the colour to highlight positive words.

If I am an activist then everyone is to some degree. People are very critical of others that hold strong beliefs, if I mention vegetarianism; the same as if somebody christian mentions God, I get accused of trying to force it down people throats. Mass media in doing this is never accused of it. Sigh.

projection sketch up

Please click on the images for a closer look.
As you can see, this is a first attempt at using google sketch up. Nice and simple to use but unfortunately I don't have enough time to learn it before I have to submit this. here is an aerial shot of the IDEAL space i would use for a projection work. Long white wall, and easy access to walk straight through without noticing the work if that should happen, as well as enough space to interact with it. The projector is up high in the centre of the room, pointing down low so that people can walk in front of it and still see the projected image when the light source is OFF. When it is ON they will only be able to see red text, illustrated in the images below.
I found it VERY hard to get a light source coming from a spotlight so had to improvise and use the default sunlight setting, and cut a long hole in the bottom of the wall to let the light in. As you can see here, Sang is poking through the roof getting too excited and shillouette man rotates with the view and is annoying. The shadows from the people passing through are cast onto the wall where previously light was shining on some lovely red lettering cut out of vinyl and stuck to the wall.

In this image you can see the white text in the projection has been revealed by the shadows, making full sentences from the words in red that were previously the only thing visible on the wall. So in the ideal situation in this ideal room of wonder the room would not be dark at all like this image, the only shadows would be those cast by the people in the room.

The light source where the hole in the wall is would have to be very strong, and very precise. It could possibly be another projector showing just white light so that then it would match exactly the dimensions of the wall with no light bleeding out the sides.

revisiting the text

Looking at this months after creating it there are some things i will change. Firstly, the quotes are far too close together. I think if i were to project this i would make the composition a lot wider and have fewer quotes over a larger area. This would make them easier to read, and the viewer could concentrate on one at a time rather than being bombarded with words and messages.

I am going to remove some of the more confrontational statements so that the reading of it is more ambiguous in a sense. I don't want it too be too easily recognisable as the work of someone who doesn't eat meat :)

I could set up an online poll or something of that description, or upload a video to youtube and get resonses on that then use them. I don't think this would have any advantages though, much of the same comments that i have already sampled would be repeated and it would seem a little too calculated. I love these quotes because they are pulled from the internet. People act much differently on line compared to speaking with someone face to face. People seem to have more extreme views and speak more confidently, sayig a lot of un-PC things! The source of my text is endless, anyone has access to it and it can be altered or deleted at any time. Taking this text out of context and putting it in physical space rather than the hyper-real domain of the internet lets people examing this online behaviour. People reading it will not directly link it with coming from the intenet as it could have come from anywhere. They will contemplate the extreme views and behaviours demonstrated and hopefully this will provoke some sort of reaction or chain of thought.

One thing i really liked from the previous piece I submitted was the photographs i took for documentation. They became an entirely new work in themselves, cropping the text so that it wasn't read as a complete sentence but you still got the general idea and message.

Text in public space-

Ideas for possible locations and placements, looking around Mount Eden at existing text in public spaces, methods of writing and display.If i wanted to do something 'activist' i could write it on a chalk board or something else used by a shop for advertising. Chalk is good because it doesnt cause permanent damage. Shame this particular one is for a fruit and vege market.
Nice subtle little spot for putting text. It would look cool with something that fitted around the whole curb piece in another texture or shade of white. When keeping in mind the reveal/cnceal element of my work i was thinking about a time based piece that would decay over time. Decay isn't really what I'm after but something on the round would suit being revealed by being worn away. The only things I could think of as mediums were paint and dirt; paint would take months, even years to reveal any message and dirt, well, it gets cleaned up. Another possibility could be to clean a section of pavement then write on it in wax (in a marvellously pretty font), the wax would deter dirt then i could return to it and pick the wax off. Thought of that as I was typing and quickly realised that i do not want a part in revealing the text myself, doing it 'for' the viewer as such.

If you're thinking about text in public space on posters, this is it.
PHANTOM=PHANTOM=PHANTOM=PHANTOM=PHANTOM

Cute little bone paste up. Pasting could be a possible medium although today I saw a man scraping posters off these little boxes, they all appear very clean so i think it would be a very fleeting work if my text looked anything like traditional graffitti situated in any public place

Physics-natural projections- Jiyeon Song

"...when a person learns through insight or 'aha' the information is better remembered.”
(Auble, Franks, & Soraci, 1979)

The One Day Poem Pavilion uses the sun to reveal lines of text in a poem one stanza at a time.
Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion's surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which-during specific times of the year-transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice. The poem is about life being finite and the artist describes his work as breaking away from the fast paced world of the internet.
This work has so many thing i like in it, the revealing and concelaing on the text, and this all happens just with the aid of the SUN its so cool. It happens over about a 7hour period so you have time to contemplate each line of the text. The speed of the revealing and concealing element of my work is something I am having trouble deciding on because it directly effects the relational aspect of the work. The poem isn't really interactive in a relational sense apart from being able to walk through it and block shadows, it focuses more on the experience of natural phenomena in architecture rather than digital technology. Using natural elements as part of the wprk is hugely sucessful for me, Olafur Eliasson also naturally occuring phenomena and he's my favourite. I love anything that incorperates art and science/maths; computers, chaos theory, sacred geometry, physics, chemistry etc etc. I think the poem is a little cliche from what pictures i have seen of it but it does work excellently with the sculpture and reading the artists statement I can see how the poem inspired his work. Just one more thing, i really like pixellation, evidence that the computer had a hand in making something (because most of the time you can't tell). The projector i used previously added a degre of pixellation to the projected image which i thought worked really well and i liked the documentation i took of it.

Go to the link at the top of the page and read more into how he made it and see some of his research it is well worth while.

Rachel Rakena

Rachel Rakena’s ‘Mihi Aroha’ was exhibited at Scape in 2002, a tribute to her late mother it communicates ideas about identity and bi-cultural living. In this work projections of emails received after the death of her mother filter down screens like tears, the screens set in the form of a whare allow the emails to be seen from both inside and out. The personal nature of the language and the setting of a sacred meeting place contrast with the uniform procession of computed text filing down the walls. While showing no evidence of her mother’s hand or person it retains a strong human element. Mihi Aroha evokes passionate emotions through revealing personal messages; fleeting emails that could have been erased in an instant are elevated from their temporal status and transformed into an artwork. Rakena uses the impermanent nature of digital works and the internet to her benefit to emulate the fragility of life, looking at traces people leave behind.

The text in her work has undergone a long transformation. Formerly handwritten letters of sympathy have been replaced by emails, the emails then taken from the computer and projected onto the walls of a wharenui type structure. Past, present and future forms of community and personal communication come together in her work to allow a new form of engagement within the white walls of the gallery. P.s i have written about her work before which is why this is slightly more formal than the rest of my writing, it is in my own words.

I cannot find any footage of the exhibition but i do remember seeing a little bit of it. The use of emails as the text, giving them more importance by taking them out of their original context is what most interests me about her work. It looks as if you could walk through her work and see the inside walls. I'm going to write about it as if you could have done that because i have no idea... so, walking through her work you would walk inside the wharenui and see the same images inside and out. In a traditional marae the most ornate carvings and the tukutuku panels were all on the inside of the marae, which is shaped to resemble a person. Putting the inside outside is revealing all the personal things and sacred messages of sympathy for the world to see. It would be very moving to see because it is a subject with a lot of emotion involved. I think people might be a little apprehensive about walking inside it because of the calm nature of the work, I would like to just sit back and watch it play (it is about 2mins 30 seconds) before going for a closer look to read the text. It has quite a lot of space around it which would allow for this and more private encounters of the installation/projection.

The subject matter of my work has a lot of emotion involved for me but I find that revealing too much of that in the work is not the right approach, so i decided to go with something not quite light hearted but certainly more playful in the wording and where i was sourcing it from.

everyone has seen this BUT

i LOVE postsecret!

I would call this a relational artwork. Frank Warren acts as a curator and posts all of these postcards online, every monday (NZ time) there are new ones. They can be funny odd little mannerisms people admit to, light hearted thoughts, or unmentionable secrets and sometimes cries for help. Different people will relate to each one, they are from all ages and all walks of life and i think it is comforting to know that someone feels the same way you do, and comforting to the authors that they can get something off their chest. You can respond to these postcards via the blog and these responses are printed underneath.

A lot of these people don't seem to be comfortable with not fitting the social norm, i love the above postcard :) I think together they all reveal what it means to be human, and makes it ok to have faults and fears. It is very important to me to consider psychology in my work, and i prefer an audience of 'normal' people rather than those who are art educated. I love to make things for family and friends to make them happy or brighten their day, and love artworks that do this by reaching out to strangers as you would your closest friends. Putting art into public space, especially via the internet gives people who's voices are not usually heard in the art world a chance to express themselves without being judged critically on the artistic merits of what they are doing, it just makes people feel good about themselves i guess :)

This work uses text like me! ( why doesn't me have a capital M but i always has to?)

My text is slightly more negative. I'm actually quite sick of it and don't want to use it anymore but don't want to change it just now because it will require weeks of thought because one thought always leads to seven more and so on...

The text here is similar to mine in that it is a collaboration from lots of people, some of this is typed and some hadwritten. It gives me an idea to take screen shots of my text in its original format then project those somewhere. ou would get a better sense of the setting BUT I don't se many reasons for doing that, and it wouuld look a bit messy.

this is beautiful

analyzing the audience

"With all his tools perfected his man institutions - such as the motor sensory - or acknowledges the limits of their power away. Engines give huge forces available, it looks like his muscles in any direction can send, and that the ship Plane makes that neither water nor air prevent its movement. with the glasses he corrected the deficiencies of the lens in his eye, with the telescope he looks to distant expanse, with the microscope he overcomes the limitations of visibility caused by the construction of its retina concerned. in the photographic camera, he has an instrument that the fleeting vision states, which gave him the gramophone record for the same transitory leistenmmuß sound impressions, both basically given him materializations of the assets of remembrance, his memory. with the help of Telephones hears He distances, even as the fairy tale would reach respect, the script was originally the language of the absent, (...). The man is, so to speak, a kind of prosthetic God has become quite great if it all his auxiliary organs creates, but they are not with him to grow and make him occasionally too much. incidentally He has a right to comfort is that this development is not just with the year 1930 AD will be completed. distant times are new, probably inconceivable great progress in this area the culture to make the God similarity even further. "

Freud, Sigmund, Das Unbehagen der Kultur (1930), Frankfurt aM, 1989, S.86 - 87 Freud, Sigmund, the unease of Culture (1930), Frankfurt am Main, 1989, p.86 - 87

I really like this quote, yes it is poorly translated but it highlights human's preoccupation with always wanting to see further, closer, to overcome the limitations of their body. People are inquisitive, they like to know things, see things, better themselves. I have found that when looking at a lot of collaborative internet based works i.e Human Clock, so many people get involved and love the works, who wouldn't want to be part of an artwork? It's like being an extra on a film you get your nanosecond of fame, satisfaction from just knowing that you were there. People relate better to situations they can imagine themselves in, something they can personally relate to. Why do we take so many photos of ourselves? There are so many answers to that but we LIKE seeing pictures of ourselves and the thought that other people will see them too, look at facebook. There are exceptions of course but I'm not going to try and accomodate everyone's reaction within my artwork, that isn't the point. I need to read more on psychology/psychoanalysis/phemomenology.

Colour

Perception of colour, light and shadow is very important in my work, noticing subtle differences in these is the key to the viewer interacting with it. In past projects I have looked at the work of Olafur Eliasson for ideas on light play and how we see colours, I find is work very physics based (waves! not that light is strictly a wave but wave properties are fascinating). He harnesses natural phenomena and presents it inside a gallery, The Weather Project involved a huge artificial Sun inside the Turbine Hall at the Tate Gallery. In videos of this work you can people lying on the floor of the gallery basking in the glow of a ginormous artificial 'sun'. They could see themselves whilst lying down in a giant mirror that covered the ceiling. It looked like a very relaxed situation for an art gallery, people seem to be at ease and feel at home. I guess in some ways you feel like your reactions to artwork are being judged by other viewers when you visit an exhibition. Interactivity quashes this feeling and people seem to lose their inhibitions if more than one participant is invited to partake in the work. I think the scale of it, and the size of the room it is in helps with this, people are free to move and not in each other's way, they can all experience it.
A problem with my final work from last year is the space I displayed it in. A bigger room, with a larger surface to project on would have been a lot more sucessful. It would allow people to more more freely within the space, play with the scale of their shadows, and have in some ways a more private experience. Well, just experience it where they don't have to worry about getting in someone else's way and effecting their reading of the work or limiting what another person can see/do.


Eliasson's installations are often experimental, laboratory-like, aiming to provoke visitors to reflect upon their own processes of perception and the discrepancy between knowledge conveyed and knowledge produced by real experience. The subject of colour perception is of particular interest to Eliasson, in particular the mediation or experience of colour in space. At Ikon, Eliasson proposes to create a self-contained sculptural environment in which a colour matching laboratory is created exploring variations in human colour perception.

The below is an image from Eliasson's 2006 work 'Your Uncertainty Of Colour Matching Experiment'. People have to choose a colour on the computer screen that they think closely matches the tone of blue Eliasson has provided for them. the resulting circles are formed with the original coulour and the one chosen by the viewer/participant.
This is one of my favourite works of his just because it deals with physical and chemical properties of people that alter their perception; things that they cannot change. No social, issues or past experiences (except for eye injuries..) effect what they give to this work it is all sort of chosen for them already.

ha.

This is actually amazing. I wonder if they send you pictures of the whole process your adopted lamb goes through.

Here we are petting it and spraying raddle in its eyes.

here it is frolicking with other lambs with no tails after being taken from its mother

oooh look now its in a pen with all the other boy lambs. we can tell this because we took a chunk out of its ear while we were burning off it's tail and putting a rubber ring around its balls.

It's fat enough now so were loading it onto a truck to go and die so we can eat it and

craft a pair of ug boots from it's supple skin.

All this for only $270!

Plus we profit from the wool, skin and flesh of your lambykins

Oh how I wish I had come up with this.

sticky linty

Keeping the idea of 'revealing' the text i had an idea to make the text out of some sort of sticky material and place it where people will either walk or brush against. My mock up is pretty shoddy but you get the idea!!

Sticky tape stuck to the floor (didn't have double sided tape, or money to buy any because I can't get a loan because I'm not a student because I'm not enrolled because I'm not accepted because I haven't passed) The idea is that you don't notice it, which could prove to be difficult as light reflects off it. One solution would be to install it in a dimly lit gallery but then you still have the problem of the sensation of it sticking to your feet, and a gellery would be too clean so it might not pick up enough dirt.

Site: Office Floor/my bedroom
Duration: 2days
Materials: Sellotape from a blue elephant dispenser

before...

after....(3days) CLICK TO ENLARGE

So it worked ok, it would look better if the text was in a nice font but if you try and cut sellotape to look nice it just rips. Some sort of adhesive may be better. I like the subtle grey of the tape and think this would look nice on a plain coloured floor (sorry I don't have access to one just now). I noticed H2GO advertising stuck to the pavement around the city for their 'snapped for cash' promotion, and thought that could be a possible location for the work. I want to find out what materials they use but my computer won't go to their website for me to email them :(

If I were to use the street as a location, that removes the choice of the viewer to conceal the work again; it wouldn't be an instant action to reveal it either and would build up over time. This is a great idea but not with the text I will be using or the interaction I would like to achieve. I want the reveal/conceal part to be able to be easily reversed so that the viewer has more choice in what they see and when. With the test I just performed, the work would have to be located where the same people would see it each day and therefore see it develop over time otherwise I don't see it as being very effective.

Ideally I would have the words I had in my first installation printed in vinyl on the floor in red flowery text, with the sticky words (negative words) in helvetica or something equally as exciting. Ok IDEA! IDEA!!!!! put some sort of dirt about the gallery so that the text is revealed quite rapidly? But then it's pretty much a one hit wonder. Cool to think that people would wander about gawking at these pretty words then find the others surfacing. I wonder what they would do??? go and get their feet dirty and run around maybe... I wonder how they would react to offensive text, if they would tell other exhibition goers that they thought they could see poo bum' written on the floor. tee hee. To have the viewers want to walk through dirt to reveal the text would be cool. I think the appearance of the room without the text revealed would have to be quite striking for it not to be a complete faaaaaaaaiiilure.

That just reminded me of this advert for Fruit Bursts! Very cool idea for a billboard with an action that progresses over time. The element of time in my work will greatly effect the interactivity and wether or not the work involves relational aesthetics.

I could also do it in reverse, make the letters out of wax or something that things do not adhere to then put charcoal all over the gallery floor... or red dye? To get the charcoal or the red dye there in the first place though there would need to be some other element in the exhibition, like a giant funnel in the middle of the room with the charcoal filtering out? lame. and irrelevent unless it was incinerated bones, or paper that in theory also had the text on it. Maybe just candles lit all around the room with the writing only visible in certain lights. <---Don't like that particular idea much because it takes away the relational part. I think I still like the light play with the projection and shadows that I experimented with last year best.

Raphael Lozano-Hemmer

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work ‘Entanglement' really interested me. It is so simple with two neon signs in galleries on opposite sides of the world that are connected through a computer so that when one is turned off the other turns on. I liked the idea of somebody controlling the conditions of a room when they weren’t anywhere near it.
He is very interested in themes of perception and surveillance. I love his series of Shadow Boxes where videos from past viewers are revealed when your shadow is cast on to the hundreds of tiny tv monitors, each playing a video of a past viewer. These pieces use tracking technology to video people at the exhibit, much like surveillance. I LOVE all of his works I don't know which one to talk about! He does a lot of relational works which he calls 'relational architectures' including Under Scan, Frequncy and Volume, Standards and Double standards etc. Read about them all on his website, the link is in his name at the top of the post :).

The over-arching theme of these is definitely surveillance, with the artworks seeming to recognise your presence, follow and interact with you. If i had a computerised surveillance system, or knew how to use one I definitely would his work amazes me. One of the projectors he used can illuminate 2000 square metres. I see now why my projection with shadows wasn't quite as smoothly finished as his.

In his 2005 work 'Under Scan' two lots of participants are involved; those that are filmed to later be projected, and those whose shadows the projections appear in.

Under Scan

Relational Architecture 11

Its funny to think that in the above video all the people are really doing is looking at another person. Technology has seperated them, made the person in the projection some sort of toy that you wouldn't relate to as you would in real life. I love how he uses local people in his works, 'normal people', it is interesting to see them being filmed, how different the impact is in comparison to seeing footage of the artwork in action. Revealing the tracking equipment as he does throughout the piece (every 7 minutes) would give me a sense of unease, as if it was all fake, all a show and I was the focus of the work rather than the people in the projection, "like being in the matrix" as one viewer remarked. You can find a lot of documentation of his works on youtube, they are quite long but the one above is well worth watching.

Interesting to note He has a BSc majoring in Physical Chemistry, could account for the technicality involved in his works! I love the way he uses shadow for interaction, so the sucess of the work is dependent on the person physically being there and what they do with their body efects their viewing of the work. One major difference is that his projections are of people and mine of text. It's hard to explain but in his installations there are many kinds of interaction, depending on which participant you are the interaction could be one way if you are in the projection, and could be whole audiences co-operating to cast a large shadow to experiment with how much of an image they could see. hmmm. It is a sort of digital interaction, but dissimilar to the internet its physicality.
I want this interaction but not so complex! Just between viewers and the thoughts from other anonymous people in text form. I don't want the text to have ownership so that nobody can accuse, nobody can judge the person by their appearance, background, demenor, all the information they get is a quote, a passing remark. The text is obviously human and not generated like Lozano's 33 questions per minute (which also involves human interaction but just as a relative example of text!), it has faults and discusses a very Human issue.

you're just so two faced...

Just found a website Deceiver through random links, its a trashy gossipy sort but has a whole section on how fake the celebrities that campaign for animal rights through PETA are. Pamela Anderson gets slammed for being in a photograph with a pet dog while 90% of other celebrities are eating bacon.

This goes in the same basket as the people that tell me I'm killing carrots, then laugh at their hilarious joke unaware that my opinion of them has plummeted through the floor. I might be a hypocrite but I dont eat corpses :)

just a thought

on the role of the artist
It just occured to me that I would not recognise any of my favourite artists if I were to see them on the street. Maybe its just the type of art I like, it seems the names are known but never the faces. When people participate in artworks; like the few I have put on here as examples, they become nameless faces and the artist a faceless name. People feel some sense of pride at having contributed and are somehow visible, they get to share the fame.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

"There are things that are made to be looked at, and then there are other things that require more than just looking and walking around them,"

"There are still drinks to be had at the bar, and people to get drunk with, which is an experience you can't get on the Internet." -Rirkrit Tiravanija

Many formalities come with art galleries, namely do not touch and do not eat which are both integral parts of Tiravanija's work. The human interaction between himself and the participants seems to be what he most enjoys, in 1992 he installed a makeshift kitchen in the empty office of gallery 303 and made people curry. People could come and go as they pleased during the exhibition and share a meal with others for free. His early installations involved cooking meals for gallery-goers. I love how he makes dinner for people, and they wonder what they are supposed to do, eat it? Give something back to him? His work goes from passive viewing to active participation which is something I value in an artwork. This work reminds me a lot of Dana Lee's second year sculpture work where she delivered letters to people so I will see if I can talk to her about it she will have some good ideas. from memory she struggled to get people to participate initially, and found documenting it to be quite hard.

Collaborative/relational projects online

Sorry Everybody

Created in 2004 in response to America's election of George Bush in which 49% of voters did NOT vote for him. This is a collection of photos from people around the world

Hearing these people's thoughts and opinions is something very personal. I relate to it a lot more than TV broadcasts of elections and there is a sincereness in what they say that makes me feel bad having judged all Americans to be like George Bush. Weather the text is hand written or not, the inclusion of a photograph succeeds in creating a very personal and heartfelt tone. I think this is a very sucessful work, even if it was not ment to be artwork as such... it changed my opinions and made me feel embarassed for never wanting to travel to America and believing what I am fed by the media about Americans.

Guerrilla Goodness

This reminds me of Shelley's project with the golden keys. Random acts of kindness, little positive notes and gifts left around for people to find. I looked at this as a concept in project drawing earlier in the year, but I find it a little cliche saying things like;

'you are beautiful'

'the sun is shining for you'

They are quite nice but have no depth. When trying to write something profound you end up sounding like a cheap wall plaque, cafe art, or scrapbooking paraphenalia; peace, love, nature, forever, life. It's just subverting the traditional 'fuck you' vivided on to a school bus seat or a toilet wall. Putting my work, my text in a public place would be like graffitti. I haven't researched this at all but should think about the impact of text in a public space if this is where I am to display my artwork.

Relational Art- Nicholas Bourriaud

Relational art is "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."-Nicholas Bourriaud

The relationship between the people and the environment; The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity.
Bourriaud claims ,

"the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist."

In Relational Art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.

Relational Art University of New Mexico

Casual observers turned into participants-this is what i want my work to achieve. I am confused as to where i should situate my work, in a gallery or in a public space. Ideally it would be in public because this agrees with my ideas on documentation and secondary accounts of things. In a gallery the audience is limited to a privileged few who are expecting something from the work and are interseted in it in the first place. I like the initial idea of interaction between people through the internet, unknowingly their commentaries have become my artwork (is that illegal by the way???)
On the UNM website they describe the artist as a 'catalyst', putting ideas in place, starting the train of thought and waiting for recognition, some sort of response. Then that brings in to question who the artist actually is in all of this, the participants or the person with the initial idea? They are dependent on each other for the existence of the work.

I want to display the text from the internet so that people reconsider it and view it in a different light. I want them to relate to the people that have written the text, connect with people from a different time and place. I won't go too much further in to this because it poses more questions and invites more ideas that I don't have time for at the moment!
i.e, time paradox, are you the same person you were 10years ago, physically-no, mentally-no, just memories, yo construct your own universe blah i researched chaos theory in an earlie project which eventually lead to hard determinism and if I try and incorperate that it will just get far to out of my depth.

moving right along

These are the ideas and elements I have decided to keep from my last project.

!-text most likely text taken from a blog or forum, some informal rhetoric, nothing profound because that ends up sounding naff. I just want a spontaneous, uncalculated remark from a person that was passing through, I want it to be taken from the internet because it has a sense of impermanence there, it can be deleted and will be forgotten.

www. I like the internet as a medium because it is used for documentation, we document our lives on facebook, updating photos, relationships; even moods, news is on the internet, bank accounts, emails etc. Most of the art works I have seen from my favourite artists are only accessible to me via the internet, I get the second hand accounts from all over the world so do I really know anything at all about their work, I haven't even experienced it.
Internet conversations are not like personal like handwriting or the spoken word. On the internet you can assume different identities and a lot of people say things they would not say in person, eg;

"u stupid fuck we r animals to u dumb shit god put us here and so he put animals to so go fuck off or ill put u in the slaughter house and ill slit ur neck!!!!!!!!!!! go fuck ur mom u asshole u should eat veggies and if u dont i dont care but im just sayin when u eat animals u will die faster get sick and might get a deaise bcuz they say that if they r ill and stuff they still put them in the slaughter house and u eat that meat and soo yea i rest my case u dumb fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!! - girroxx112233

end quote.

reveal/CONCEAL- this is where the interaction comes in. The idea that the viewer in some way reveals the text is important. It is important that they are conscious of what they are revealing so that they have a choice, even if it takes them a while to realise that is the point...They should wake up to the fact that they can make a choice and SEE what is there, or they can ignore it.

idea~MEAT CONSUMPTION I know a lot about meat in New Zealand and how we get our meat. Having come from farming background with family that love hunting I have strong opinions on what I consider to be ethical. I will write that rant in another post as it will take up a LOT of space...
My work isn't targeting meat eaters as such, just ignorance. I want people to see the consumption of meat in a different light, to laugh at these ridiculous internet conversations but at the same time identify with them.

realtional---> relational aethetics, by the looks of it I wrote NOTHING about this is my blog, nor did i identify any of the artists (what wasn't i thinking) so expect many posts on this. Inter human relations and social context, people coming together, intersubjective encounters rather than subject/object, observing other viewers actions and reactions. I like it that the success of the work relys on interaction and is in a way a collaboration. Questioning the role of the author-internet based collaborations

I hope you can see what I am trying to pull together :)