Can you
see me?: Questioning the Identity
This project has two main aims.
The first is to make interactive artwork
without using hi-tech equipments (e.g. a video installation, a computer
programme, a slide projector, etc.).
Interactive art is normally associated with hi-tech equipments. For example, in Beryl Gream’s article,
‘Playing with yourself: pleasure and interactive art’ (1996), all examples
belong to the hi-tech art.
However, this does not have to be the
case. When I exhibited Rosetta Stone Series in Humid, the finalist show of Department
of Visual Arts, Keele University, I saw the audience enjoy touching them. Although this type of interaction does not
bring any dramatic change to the appearance of the artwork, clearly this is a form
of interaction.
I will pursue this line of interaction
through this project as well as through the Tactile
Art Project. And while I was
working on the latter project, I realised that, when the audience touches the
exhibits, he/she also becomes part of a spectacle. This point leads me to the more important, second aim of the
project: to question the audience’s identity.
As Brian Longhurst argues (1998), recently,
the position of the audience in museums and art galleries is destabilised
through the introduction of interactive equipments - by interacting with some
of the exhibits in a conspicuous way, the audience sometimes becomes a part of
the spectacle in the exhibition space.
Difference between the audience and the spectacle is not clearly marked
anymore. Our identity as the audience in
exhibition spaces is blurred.
To demonstrate this point, I intend, in the
first stage of this project, to make two domes, Can You See Me?, with panels of one-way mirror (each size approx.
H100CM x W150CM x L150CM). The audience
will be encouraged to crawl in and out of the domes through the small
openings. With one of the domes, you
can see the inside from the outside, but cannot see the outside from the
inside. What you can see when you are
inside are a lot of your own reflected images, while you are seen by others as
a part of a spectacle. With the other
one, one-way mirrors are facing the other way.
This time, a person inside can look at the others without being noticed,
so that the other audience become a spectacle.
In the second stage of this project, I wish
to explore the issue of the location of identity in more general terms.
It is often argued that one’s identity comes
from the difference from others - the British are different from the Germans,
Sally is different from Jane, and so on.
However, this difference is, as demonstrated in the case of the identity
of the audience in the exhibition spaces, no longer marked clearly. We do not have any clear location of our
identity anymore (see Hetherington 1998, and Suganami 1998).
I am currently conducting research on this
issue, and hoping to complete the second stage of the project in two years’
time.
reference:
Graham,
Beryl (1996) ‘Playing with yourself: pleasure and interactive art’ in Dover,
Jon (ed.) (1996) Factual Dreams: new
media in social context (London: Lawrence and Wishart)
Berger,
John (1972) Ways of seeing (London:
the British Broadcasting Corporation)
Hall
Stuart (1997a) ‘The work of representation’ in Hall 1997b
-----------
(1997b) Representation: cultural
representations and signifying practices (London: Sage publications)
Hetherington,
Kevin (1998) Expressionf of Identity
(London: Sage Publications)
Suganami,
Miho (1998) On Cultutal Hybridity
(Keele University, Sociology Workpaper)