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

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled," (Placebo), 1991

One of Gonzalez-Torres’s monumental “candy spills,” “Untitled” (Placebo), 1991, consists of 1,200 pounds of silver-wrapped hard sweets arranged as a stunning carpet on the floor of the gallery space. Visitors are invited to take a sweet and in so doing, contribute to the slow disappearance of the sculpture over the course of the exhibition. Gonzalez-Torres explores similar themes in his stacks of take-away posters, which also depend upon visitors’ participation in the piece.

Jacques Ranciere, "The Emancipated Spectator."

The foremost philosopher of art, Jacques Ranciere, argues for a new politics of seeing. The role of the viewer in art and film theory revolves around a theatrical concept of the spectacle. The masses subjected to the society of spectacle have traditionally been seen as aesthetically and politically passive - in response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a performance. Ranciere takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. Beginning by asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, instead, a melancholic affirmation of their omnipotence?

Sarah Browne Article

Sarah Browne's new article, "Crowd Theory Lite the Crowd in Participatory Art and Pop Economics," can be found in Circa, Winter 2008, Issue 126.

http://sarahbrownenews.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/new-writing-crowd-theory-lite-%e2%80%98the-crowd%e2%80%99-in-participatory-art-and-pop-economics/

Sarah Browne

As part of our contribution to the seminar day we have invited Sarah Browne to discuss and examine the response to the experiential zones we plan to create. Check out her artist website and blog at the following sites;

http://www.sarahbrowne.info/

http://selfinterestandsympathy.wordpress.com/

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.