For my Urgency Commission with the University of Exeter (UoE), I will be working with people who have been or are protesters. I am hoping some of them will be UoE staff and students. To reach people often takes a little while. In the meantime I have started to test the processes I may use to create the liminal portraits.
The intention is to involve the protester-participants in the making of their own liminal portrait, and in the process to explore and discuss AFR technologies and their potential impact on the right to protest.
In this way I need to find a process of making that can genuinely involve them, yet is steered by my plan for the final outcome. (I do not therefore call what I am doing ‘participatory art’ – I’m sure I’ll write on this later, or in a different blog, the difference between co-produced and participatory art)
Yesterday I made a whole load of monotype portraits, using a helpful volunteer as a test-subject. I will play with these in several ways, including as chine collé onto embossed prints.
The aim is to create a portrait that explores the liminality of our identity. I want to make a portrait that is both recognisable by the human eye and unrecognisable by AFR technologies.
