I’m very pleased to announce that two of my interactive works are currently on display at the Powerhouse Museum thanks to the wonderful people over at the Creativity and Cognition Studios at UTS and their beta_space project at the Powerhouse.
The official beta_space site has all the info (and just got launched yesterday ), but here is an excerpt of the blurb:
Time Smear and Time Slicer by artist Andy Polaine are part of a series of live video works called Time Sketches that experiment with interactivity and the viewer’s image. Using video processing technologies these works play with time; chopping it up into fleeting moments and stretching it out across space. The result is a digital hall of mirrors, where you can see warped versions of yourself.
I’ll be joining up with Alexa Wright who hails from my old university at Westminster to give a short seminar on Emotion and Interaction. The details of how to register are on the beta_space website but here are the dates and times:
Wednesday 22nd March 2006, 4.30 - 6.30, Powerhouse Museum
Andy Polaine and Alexa Wright will discuss the relationship between emotion and interaction in their art practice, followed by discussion and then some light refreshment.
4.30 - 5.00pm
A chance to see Time Sketches, Andy Polaine’s new work installed in beta_space, in the Cyberworlds area of the Powerhouse Museum
5.15pm
Artist talks and questions in the Education Rooms. Staff will be on hand to direct you.
6.15pm
Drinks and light refreshment
(Is it me or does the name “Education Rooms” sound a bit too S & M for the Powerhouse?)
I wrote a little while back about the Time Smear piece and that you could download the short demo paper from the ACM website. But I’m having trouble accessing it, so you can also get it from here on my site.
Essentially I’m interested, at least in these pieces, in the moment of interaction more than the images that get produced. I am perfectly aware that the whole slit-scan thing has been done in different ways, but I’ve never experienced one working live like this and wanted to try it out myself. There is another work in there called Time Slicer which, much like an 80s video mixer I suppose, freezes frames in a sequence and keeps doing so over and over. I noticed when I was playing with this and showing others that people really started to have fun and try out different ways of chopping up their bodies and faces with the camera frame. I’m often dissatisfied with the level of interaction that many “Big Art” interactive piece illicit as most people tend to stand in front of (or in) the “art object” and not really interact. I wrote a whole paper about this if you are into this line of thinking and you can even watch the presentation of it I gave in Banff. So, I wanted to make some smaller pieces that just concentrated on one single aspect of interaction without trying to say anything too weighty. They are, I hope, playful above all else.
Thanks to Lizzie, Greg, Matthew and also to the other folks from the Powerhouse that made such an art-form out of drilling holes in walls.
Also to the twins in the photos above (thanks to Greg for these again) who generously larked around in front of the work and created some very amusing images.
Last, but not least (this is sounding a bit like Oscars night), thanks to my lovely wife, Karin, for prodding me to make some interactive works again and putting up with me spending more time in front of the computer than is healthy in any relationship.