Archive for the 'public art' Category

Augusto Boal and Theater of the Oppressed

Published
by
Lucas
on November 22, 2006
in performance art and public art
. 0 Comments

A short while ago I went to Adelaide to run part of a workshop on experimental public art practices. I tried some exercises from Augusto Boal’s book “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”.
Here are a few links I noted about Boal from around the net…

http://www.theatrelinks.com/oppressed.htm

http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org/en/index.php?nodeID=162

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/12.11/15-boal.html

http://ctoatala.org/maps.html#australia

http://www.northernvisions.org/boal.htm

Participation, Experience, Public Art, Radio

Published
by
Lucas
on October 20, 2006
in interviews by me, public art and spatial politics
. 2 Comments

…what I’ve been up to lately…

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Together with Eve Vincent, presenting at this conference at COFA:

http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au/newsevents/news/news_0115.html

our abstract:

Participation and Experience: Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty

The desire for an active spectator-participant was a key goal of avant-garde art during the twentieth century. Rhetoric surrounding such art practice often connected “aesthetic interactivity” with the ideal of a wider participatory democracy. During the 1960s, in an attempt to overcome the separation between “art and life” which characterised the museum-based practice of much modernist art, artists like Allan Kaprow developed “Happenings” which occurred in the everyday places and rhythms of city life. Utilising the tools bequeathed by Kaprow’s Happenings, artist group SquatSpace now runs the Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty — wherein the “work of art” is to facilitate discussion about neighborhood life and community organising in inner-urbanSydney. This paper moves through the perennial question “but is it art?” in order to examine the Tour of Beauty as a case study of “Art as Experience” (John Dewey). This co-presentation engages two perspectives — SquatSpace collective member Lucas Ihlein talks about the making of “the tour as art”, and Eve Vincent speaks from the perspective of a participant-audience member.

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Continue reading ‘Participation, Experience, Public Art, Radio’

the art of snoopping

Published
by
Lucas
on July 5, 2004
in performance art, public art and spatial politics
. 0 Comments
On Wed 7 July 2004, Jaye Hayes presented an evening of "snoopping" @ West Space. In the invitation to the event, she wrote:
"NUCA has lured me out of the shadows for 1 nite only to share the SNOOPP story for Resistance Through Rituals. there'll be some kind of explanation of my behaviour & various bits of antenna trash, plus a tour of the local gutter network.
so come along for a cup of tea & a chat :)
jaye"
—
NUCA #41 : Jaye Hayes | snoopp
snoopp vs 2.0 (2004)
subliminal non object oriented piezoelectric processor
http://subliminal.va.com.au/snoopp
She crawls into inner-city gutters after dark, a mobile cellular operator, a subliminal insect on an obscure mission. She is submerging, diving into the darkness, a bug in the code of the street, a disturbance in the energy field. The de-visioned dancer becomes a renegade radiobody, picking up signals & generating bodytext transmissions. She operates as an interactive micro-media unit; embodying the meta-physics of micro-radio.
Gutters are a network, she finds a portal & hacks in. As she jams the architecture of the indent, she mobilizes other possibilities. A temporary telemetric system emerges as the radiobody tunes in to the spatial signal & starts generating feedback. Inside the loop, her data-body dislocates across time-space dimensions creating a re-spatializing sequence; an electro-magnetic interference zone. Dissolving into waves of white noise, she becomes a distributed radio-kinetic entity.
Radio text & signal data are redirected via tech-tools while other residues remain at street level. Night after night, lurking in the dark, mapping the nodes of the network, a tiny telemetric insect shedding data, creating links to an elsewhere…

………….

after the event, Jaye wrote the following:

an experiment in SNOOPP sharing >>>
 
a back room, a faraday cage, a radio bunker, a listening library, a snoopp cell, a receiving dock.
i opened a gateway to my subliminal world & invited low-level listening & personal space-sharing.
the cosy room filled with warm bodies. 'it felt like being in your bedroom.'
but the critical mass solidified an expectation of 1-to-many broadcasting….
 
she attempted to reboot.
she deployed tactical failure.
she let them feel their way in.
she followed the flow.
she was speechless.
she hung out in the library.
she was dull & happy.
she scanned their bodies for signals.
she made personal connections.
she made lists.
she drank tea.
she became buffologous.
she started invoking willow.
she let andrew set the tone.
they waited for something to happen.
it didn't.
she let it go on that way for a while.
some people got immersed.
some people got impatient.
she was too subtle for some.
she surrendered to talkback.
she was curious.
she was conversational.
she was unprofessional.
she was a duckling (ugly).
she showed them her antenna trash.
she made a circuit of radiobodies.
she channel surfed.
she consulted the books.
she held onto the rock.
she played the inbetweens.
she led them out into the rain…