New interactive art show blurs the line between artist and audience
Most gallery art is of the “look but don’t touch” school. And rightly so, says Jane Tingley, assistant professor of hybrid media at the University of Waterloo and co-curator of a new interactive art show, appropriately called INTERACTION, now open at Kitchener-Waterloo’s THEMUSEUM. “Especially when it comes to paintings, you can’t touch them because the oils on your fingers will destroy the paint,” she says.
But the tools we use to make art have changed. Putting together INTERACTION offered Tingley and co-curator Alain Thibault (artistic director of Montreal’s annual international digital arts festival Elektra) and curatorial assistant Zana Kozomora a chance to showcase a form of art that is “new and interesting.” The works in the show are intended to engage the audience’s bodies as well as their minds, with playful and open-ended encounters, rich sensory experiences and immersive environments.
Walk into an installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, for example, and your facial features will be compared to those of 43 students who disappeared in a mass kidnapping in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in 2014. “The piece uses the same sort of biometric surveillance algorithms used by the police and military for facial recognition,” says Tingley. “But instead of being used for surveillance, they’re being used to search for the students.” Since there’s not much likelihood of a match, the cameras run through the student’s faces in a poignant homage to the missing.
While Lozano-Hemmer’s work is highly political, Perspection by Matthew Biederman and Pierce Warnecke is more playful. It synthesizes sound and images across three separate projection screens to create an experience unique to each viewer. And Jessica Thompson’s Swinging Suitcase revolves around a number of suitcases that generate and broadcast a chirruping flock of birds when you move them around.
All the works selected for the exhibition, which runs until May 13, “use both old and new technologies to imagine the future, explore the context of our technological present and critically reflect on digital culture,” Tingley says. What unites them is their essential interactivity.
“They’re not just responding to you as a viewer,” Tingley explains. “You can participate with them and create the meaning of the work as you interact with it. They challenge that ‘hands off’ idea of art.”
Explore all of the exhibitions at THEMUSEUM.ca.