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.