[Home] [Introduction] [Q&A] [Artists] [Definitions] [Timeline] [Activities] [Further Reading]

SPACE ODYSSEYS: sensation & immersion

Q&A

QUESTIONS by Tony Nesbitt
ANSWERS by George Alexander

Do you think that overtly technological art can improve our relationship with technology?
Artists always play unofficially with official technology -- from Renaissance perspective grids to acrylics and photocopy machines. The play factor in artmaking is crucial -- it creates the essential as if conditions that allow us to reconcile tensions and conflicts and our contradictory relationships to the world. Exactly as children playing with their toys in the sandpit externalise their relationship to the world. The art gallery plays this role with what might otherwise appear to be threatening new technologies.

Is it possible that technology in some sense over-determines the type of art that is made using it?
Technology does feel like a bulldozer with its own green lights. And it seems to be setting the agenda, when even our cultural experience is driven by it, from how we bank to how we court each other. But the multimedia used is of our time, just as the technology at the time of the Greeks allowed for that kind of work to be produced.

What would you say are the key ideas and emotions that such works can communicate more effectively than, for example, more conventional static images in frames?
The human need to communicate is basic, across all cultures and eras. Painting since the Renaissance has developed highly codified and subtle forms that a discriminating viewer knows how to deal with. Digital media are celebrated as being more participatory and open-ended; yet I think this exhibition actually plugs in to older forms as well, from cave painting, through dioramas and panoramic photography, to theatre and the idea of total environment theorised in the 'thirties. It's a much more encompassing experience on offer that helps you channel-surf across the senses, rather than cornering the market on just one (eye for painting, ear for music and so on).

Do you think that such art points to a developing synergy between the visual arts and sciences? If so, do you think that this blurring of the distinction between the two is a good thing? Does either one tend to lose out in this merger?
The stale old debate about the 'two cultures' (C.P. Snow) certainly doesn't help: the idea of the arty type on one side, sitting across a gulf with a pointy-headed scientist on the other with a fixed smile, is not constructive. Dürer and his Cartesian coordinates that helped with fixed-point perspective, the Cubists and the theory of relativity, all allowed for vital exchanges. It is when science and art are new and open and unofficial that the most invigorating and productive things start happening.

Why do you think contemporary artists seem to feel increasingly obliged to stimulate (and sometimes assault) all the senses?
I always put my money on the idea that perception involves the entire body and that the world presents itself to us as a joined-up whole rather than array of five different kinds of sensation.

Do exhibitions of this nature challenge the concept of who the artist is? That is, is it increasingly the mind of the electrician or tech-head that drives the work?
Yes there has been a reconfiguration of the role of artist over the last fifty years, externalised much more by the nature of the new media. But the collaborative process is definitely at play here, while the artist patents the design-value of the work. Certainly the role of 'genius' and 'masterpiece' may be obsolete.

Do you think interactive installations of this sort, where the audience is largely responsible for the artistic experience, blur the concept of authorship?
Artworks are always two-way and open, but again this is exteriorised, and emphasised with the new technology.

Is there a basic, common element that puts all these installations in the same exhibition?
This show actually is carefully chosen, not just to dazzle with geewhiz technoculture and to try to be breathlessly ahead and novel; it is much more about showing how a medium of least dimension might open up alternate interior spaces (what Bachelard called 'intimate immensity') as well as the possibility that the speed of digital media could stimulate 'the pleasure of slowness' (Milan Kundera).

[Home] [Introduction] [Q&A] [Artists] [Definitions] [Timeline] [Activities] [Further Reading]