Art Review - February Issue - (Page 112)

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Which doesn’t mean that I never meet people with enough wisdom, taste and good sense to challenge my half-baked views on new media art. That’s what happened exactly one week before writing these lines. I had just finished giving a kind of crash course in interactive art at a London art venue. The audience, fuelled by vodka tonic and cranberry juice, looked pleased. I felt victorious and smart. Until this guy came up to me and said, “You know, these interactive coconuts and musical gumboots you’ve just shown us? They are fun and they might be wonderful. But when you watch, not even that closely, they are not pretty to look at.” I’m not going to discuss aesthetics, what’s beautiful, what’s not and whether a urinal has the right to grace the exhibition room of museum. However, his critical comment reminded me of my frustrations when I go to new media art events. The venues are packed with pieces that beg to be interacted with. Unfortunately there are even more visitors who want to play around and test the machines. Hence there are queues and that feeling of boredom mixed with irritation you had not experienced since you were sixteen. The cutest boy in the neighbourhood was on the dance floor, another girl prancing in front of him while you were standing there waiting for your turn to grab his arm, not enjoying the spectacle, not sharing any bit of the girl’s obvious but ephemeral, my dear! delight. That’s the trouble with many interactive artworks: when you are not the one monopolising the space, you are provided with a limited amount of gaiety… Unless you’re in front of the work of an artist who understands that the interaction with a piece starts at the very moment gallerygoers lay their eyes on it. I remember seeing Bondage 2004 , an installation by Atau Tanaka, two summers ago at an art festival. Having read its description in the catalogue, I was determined to snub the piece. I was there to see bubbles pop out of the fancy truck when I clapped my hands and hear frog songs when I walked on that sonic carpet. Bondage creates music using portraits of Japanese women made by photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. The images are projected onto a shoji – the traditional Japanese sliding paper screen. With their movements in front of the installation, visitors scan the erotic images and reveal hidden layers, which in turn result in transformations of the installation’s sound environment. Bondage was the most extraordinary piece I saw at the festival. I didn’t care whether I could modify the image or the sound myself. I was perfectly happy to stand back in the little dark room and witness how other people’s movements were composing and re-composing the audiovisual tableau. If the man who’s not to be impressed by the sonic properties of boots ever reads these lines, I’d like him to know that I’m awfully sorry I couldn’t tell him there and then what I’ve just written down now. My only excuse is that I had drunk too many vodka tonics myself. I should have told him to take the London tube and go to the Victoria & Albert Museum to discover what might be the most enchanting art work I’ve seen for a long time. Right on top of the pond of the V&A’s John Madejski Garden, United Visual Artists and onepointsix have installed Volume, an immersive sculpture of light and sound, an array of 46 columns that respond to your every move. Each column is associated with a di erent piece of music. Visitors orchestrate the composition and the visual show by the way they move around the sculpture. Getting to slowly understand the power you have on the light waves and on the soundscape is very gratifying. What’s even more exciting is knowing that you also have the power to do absolutely nothing, to sit on the side and revel in other people’s unconscious e orts to delight your eyes. United Visual Artists and onepointsix, Volume, 2006, created as part of the PlayStation Season at the V&A. Photos: John Adrian. Courtesy United Visual Artists p112-113 Digital Feb AR Feb07.in2 2 10/1/07 17:51:42  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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