Intention Statement

I feel a little uncomfortable working and setting up my pieces in the studio, as I feel like I’m trapped in a bubble; I don’t get to work with my hands for pretty much any other classes, and I love the outdoors. I feel like art placed in a gallery is usually very cold, emotionless, or can even be one-dimensional, while public art can have so much more life. You have a limited variety of individuals who visit galleries, and thusly only a smaller range of interpretations on a piece. What I mean to say is, I prefer the average person’s take on my art. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to sit anonymously and overhear a regular person’s conversations about a piece; it is usually the most sincere. I also love shock value, and seeing how people react to new objects or unknown situations, which is a bit of my Human Studies/Educational Studies major coming out.

Initially, I wanted to try something different than my prior projects, and I’m not sure why, but I wanted to try something a bit more conceptual. I wanted to address internet in terms of place and location. I think that the fact that we store information, talk with each other, and many people spend most of their days on the internet qualify it as a location. The piece would compare bandwidth to a natural resource, and attempt to “liberate” it. There are areas of the campus without wireless internet that I wanted to divert like a river, as members of agrarian civilizations did with rivers to irrigate their crops. Working with the technology was not too much to deal with, it was more an issue of getting the necessary equipment, which is usually pretty expensive. I had to drop this idea in lieu of one less grand, but a bit more interactive.

I eventually began to look into the difference between the literal area viewed by the campus waterfront webcam, and the space seen by anyone viewing the feed on their computer monitor. I began to see the literal space as a stage for events, that don’t ever really seem to happen, when one spends a day glancing at the webcam’s updates (like I did in preparation for the project). The space is almost an unchanging picture, save for the random couple of students walking, the car parking in the first spot, or the difference in weather/time, and I want to change that.

While incomplete until the performance aspect, the piece is a comment on surveillance. Most students either do not know where the camera is placed, or about the it at all, and do not amend their actions due to this, despite being in full view of anyone at all who enters in the link. Without the performance, the piece is a voyeur’s dream; people acting naturally (even though they are not in a domestic space).

I would like to reschedule the performance event for this weekend, when the weather is supposed to be better. In the invitation, I will ask people to come and perform in any way they like; to act, to sing, to play an instrument, to deface the stage, to read, even to pantomime, really any way in which they chose to express their first amendment rights, but only on the stage. Ironically, freedom of speech will be rendered moot by the fact that there is no audio feed, only video. I will also send out an email asking people to watch the live feed.