rt87 editorial
The Heart Library Project, George Khut with Caitlin Newton-Broad, Greg Turner and David Morris-Oliveros
photo Julia Charles
The Heart Library Project, George Khut with Caitlin Newton-Broad, Greg Turner and David Morris-Oliveros
Audiences are increasingly becoming the subjects of artworks, participants in them, even co-makers. Our cover image is from Simon Terrill’s epic photographic series Crowd Theory (page 49); this time the artist invited a community to collaboratively respond to the Port of Melbourne. In The Heart Library Project (p34), George Khut invited his audience to have their heartbeats translated into seductive, manipulable digital imagery, but also, with his collaborators, offered the opportunity to reflect on and share the experience through drawing and dialogue. Jordana Maisie’s The Real Thing (p33) is a giant kaleidoscope in which the viewer is magically fragmented and gloriously rearranged. Babel Swarm (p36) invites the public into Second Life, providing an avatar and the opportunity to convert spoken or texted words into the tumbling letters of a strange ecosystem. The beauty of Keith Armstrong’s Shifting Intimacies (p33) is only realised when the actions of audience members manipulate a digitised dancer. And, for a different kind of engagement, Pool, the ABC’s new online site for the sharing and re-use of digital art (p37), abounds with opportunities for artists and public to engage. Meanwhile in Hobart, in a work about labour and contemplation, and free of digital transmutation, Philippa Steele advertised free clothes washing for gallery-goers (p54), a quieter form of participation, but without which… RT
Image note: An example of an experience-map created by exhibition participants (Hope Lover, Ruby Jones and Scarlet Jones) in response to their experience in The Heart Library – Biofeedback Mirror, April 2008, UTS Gallery, NSW, and subsequently exhibited as part of Mirror States exhibition, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2008 (curated by Lizzie Muller and Kathy Cleland) see page 34-35.
RealTime issue #87 Oct-Nov 2008 pg. 1
