React and Act Proposal:

As a group we are investigating notions of participation, engagement, experience and collaboration for our contribution to the seminar day. We intend to do this by providing different experiential zones of engagement. Our objectives are to explore the process of collaboration between constructed zones of experience and the engagement fostered by the participants'/audiences' interaction with these spaces.

React and Act sample imagery

React and Act sample imagery

Augusto Boal

Augusto Boal is a Brazilian theatre director, writer and politician and also the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed. This method uses theatre as a means of knowledge and transformation of the interior reality in the social and relational field. He contends that the Aristotelian ethic is a means of oppressing the masses which favours a select and privileged hierarchy. Theatre of the Oppressed aimed to reverse the Brazilian government's oppressive use of theatre to propagate its system. Instead, Boal's method incites an active public which explore, show, analyze and transform the reality in which they are living. "While some people make theater,"says Boal, "we are all theater."

People as a medium

This is a link to an exhibition 'Double Agent' (curated by Claire Bishop) last year in the ICA in London with the theme of 'People as medium' particularly in the work of Dora Garcia. Garcia's work 'Instant Narrative' involves a typist narrating the actions of the audience as they enter the gallery. This written narration is then projected onto the wall of the gallery free for the audience to read and react to.

Issues that have arisen with the 'people as a medium' include;

-authorship within interactive art - the artist is not the controller anymore

-the ethics of performance and representation (as regards the blue room)

-defining the experience of participatory art

http://www.ica.org.uk/15880.twl
there is a PDF file of the gallery guide available