New approaches to Art and visual culture
CHArt Nineteenth Annual Conference
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CONVERGENT PRACTICES New approaches to Art and visual culture |
Malcolm Ferris, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Performing Histories: Visitors as Characters in Interactive Exhibition Media
Using the National Museum of Photography Film & Television (NMPFT) as a case study this paper will analyse some of the key curatorial issues relating to the staging of large-scale interactive artworks.
The context of the project in question - the NMPFT - as a specific site with a rich history of media development will be explored. The collections within the NMPFT reveal a media history moving from still image, to image combined with time to generate movement within the pictorial frame. The continuation of this vector, located in computer-based audio-visual media, is the extension of time and movement beyond the frame into the real world of user interaction.
Some of the determinate characteristics of digital media artefacts will be mapped, reflecting upon the rule-based nature of computational media and how the types of ‘restricted freedom’ they explore and effect are accessed through frames of interactivity.
Finally, the curatorial agenda that was implemented as a result of these two points will be described. In doing so it will touch upon many of the consequent issues concerned with staging a media exhibition within this venue – i.e., commissioning, collecting, exhibition design and space planning, dwell time, etc.