Location
The School of Lost ArtsStart date
2019-03-23End date
2019-03-23Language
engResearch statement
Participatory art implies that audiences engage in some action or behaviour, cited by some as a “hell” (Bishop 2012), imposed and/or devoid of reflexive and reciprocal affectation, fighting for attention or offering a distraction. Three inter-related research questions frame The Feeling of Walking, a video and sound installation, that re-uses natural materials from previous walking-inspired artworks.
How might an artwork invite performative engagement without the demands of externally endorsed evidence of being socially or critically engaged?
In what ways might video and sound works be juxtaposed with naturally occurring materials to create an immersive affective experience of sensory engagement?
How might participatory artworks be restorative rather than transactional?
The installation engages the audience members’ embodied knowledge on the value walking. It proposes that remembering walking is restorative and attention shifting, enabling what Tim Ingold (2013) refers to as training our attention. The absence of the artist is contested by the presence of her footfall; a sonic presence that evokes the listener to presence, and shifts them between their own presence and absence, as attentions, as bodies, in nature, and in the world more generally where a somatics of thinking embed us in place and time.
Assumptions about mode/s of distraction and propositions about what constitutes a mindful state are troubled through the minimalist nature of the components and the juxtaposition of digital and material content.
Indicators of its impact and significance includes:
•tCurated by The School of Lost Arts as part of Nature Design and Us
•t Produced by in National Gallery of Victoria Design Week in GeelongPublication classification
J2 Minor original creative workEvent
Nature Design and Us. Exhibition (2019 : Geelong, Victoria)Publisher
National Gallery of Victory Design Week in GeelongPlace of publication
Geelong, Vic.
