Ordinary Aura

The idea of randomization is also key to my way of thinking about making art. A major part of my proposal for this project is the creation of as many paintings as I/we can get done by September... like surfing the web or allowing the story to be written one word at a time by author after author...

Let's allow the vegetative eye a little room to veg. So to speak.

seth what interests you about the access (surveillance) piece?

maybe I'll see this more as I run through the blog posts, I'm trying to catch up with everyone.

I've done some very similar work, but tried to use my body and eyes as the sensing machine, rather than a tracking system.

there's some photos and documentation on my homepage under "projects." look for "Step-Right-Up." no video though unfortunately. adam saw it at the actionpacked show.

oh yeah, my page is synchronaut.net

About access -- it's a good question. As I've been telling students all semester, "interactive" art is usually in fact "participatory" art -- click something, something happens -- and that can be a pretty shallow way to interact with art. You interact with a novel by reading it, with a painting or a movie by watching it, and these are very deep, rich experiences; conscious participation tends to flatten out that experience, I find, whether by the nature of participatory art or because it's still relatively new as a medium or a mode.

I'm increasingly convinced that the moment of real interaction with a work comes at the moment of loss of control, when the art work stops interacting directly with you and seems to take on a life, or I suppose I should say a presence for this show, of its own. This is what I'm interested in the project I'm doing; I want to lose control as the artist, so that I too can act as a spectator to some degree. How to do this without making lazy art is a question.

So, with access, what I like is the simplicity of the interaction, and that the means of interaction is obscure to the audience, which makes it, in the older sense of the world, an "occult" experience. I don't like the narration directly addressing the person; it's kind of funny, but it flattens out the experience in that same way.

In the video documentation, my favorite moment is when the woman hurries to the stairs, apparently trying to get away from the spotlight, but when she gets there and the light clicks off she turns back; she misses it. There's an actual developing relationship between the audience and the art, and it gets at a basic human characteristic, the tug between wanting to escape and wanting to communicate.