One on one participatory artwork

Approximately 20 minutes duration

around Quadrant Mall, Launceston, Australia

2 – 6 September, 2015

Commissioned and presented by the Junction Arts Festival

 

Overview

Each participant walks through the route with a guide who offers them some hints about walking without seeing and gives them protective gloves and shin pads. Then they return to the starting point and walk it with their eyes closed.

Statement

I have an ambition for art, where the experience is all encompassing. This is art as a state of being – or becoming if you’re a student of philosophy. Art can be one of the very best things in life, and as such I want it too feel like one of the best things. I want it to require the commitment of my body and all my attention.

To fashion and design such an experience, I’m looking beyond myself and over to you. I regard the responsibility for creating such an experience as being with the individual… and I think it best that you take responsibility for doing so as much as possible. Otherwise, I’d be probably be creating a spectacle or exceptional display. These would be counter-productive to the objective of you engaging your agency.

In deciding what to present as art, I’m guided by my own inspiration. In my experience, aesthetics are more a matter of perception than creation. I find the experience of art to be a mode of being rather than an emanation of an object. For me, the world is read-made an artwork, if I can shift phase to perceive it so. So this work aims to set up this sort of phase-shift, with a focus on sound and feeling.

 

Project website featuring maps, extended description and theoretical references

Article in the Launceston Examiner