Things are happening…
I’ve had a good week with this project today – having a looming deadline and people to work with is definitely helping to push my work on.
I met Alasdair Swenson on Monday. He’s an artist who is at Salford university on the MA Creative Technology and I’m going to work with him to develop this new piece of interactive work. This part of my bursary is a delicate line, as the bursary isn’t for production, it’s for professional development. But the way I’m looking at it is that in order to take my work forward into a digital, interactive format, I need help to understand what is possible, to meet people who know how to do the things that I can’t do, so that I know how to approach them in future.
We talked lots of technical jargon, some of which I’ve heard of, others were completely new, but I now know that open frameworks, blob tracking and lots of other things exist and that what I want to make is possible. The most exciting thing was that Alasdair said that by the end of making the work, I’ll have a program that can be applied to other locations, or scaled up to bigger locations with multiple projectors. It’s this opportunity to produce work that can engage people on a larger scale that excites me. The work I’ve made by myself in the past has been limited by my own size – often the spaces I’m working in are larger, filled with many people, and my intervention as one person doesn’t have so much impact. So the possibilities this opens up will be interesting.
Alongside the more technical professional development I’ve elected to have a series of conversations with the artists Cleary & Connolly, the first of which happened on Tuesday this week. I saw the work of Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly at Dublin Contemporary in 2011. Their work uses digital, interactive, camera tracking technologies and also has an interest in movement and how the audience member is involved. They are based in Paris, so to make the best use of the bursary, we’ve arranged to have a series of skype meetings over the next few months. Our first conversation was one of getting to know each other, sharing work, processes, ideas.
It seems that we have similar occurrences when we put on interactive work – we discussed how making work about movement, often causes people to stop, stand still, watch and not move, which then means that people don’t get to experience the work.
There were a couple of references that Anne & Denis referred to that I’m going to follow up – one was a chapter from Ulysses (I tried reading the novel once, but failed) and one was about Samuel Beckett’s tramps.
I do keep on finding answers to some questions, only to be faced with more questions. Mostly to do with how the digital files interface with the equipment in the exhibition space. It wouldn’t be professional development if it was easy though, would it?
