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Conformity, Process and Deviation: Digital Arts as 'Outsider' |
Brass Art (Chara Lewis, Manchester; Kristin Mojsiewicz, Glasgow and Anneké Pettican, Huddersfield, UK)
Submerged and disrupted identities | Beyond the walls - the disguise
“For the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler [1] ‘the house [has] provided an especially favored site for ‘uncanny’ disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by the terror of invasion by alien spirits’. InThe Imagining of Things, Chara Lewis, Anneké Pettican and Kristin Mojsiewicz, the three artists working collectively as Brass Art act as those ‘alien spirits’, invading the once private, now very public interiors of the Parsonage, a large, stone-built Georgian house standing on the very edge of Yorkshire moorland, once home to the Brontë sisters.” [2]
The desire to inhabit the creative spaces of particular authors represents an expansion of the portrayal of the self and the double by Brass Art. It is germane that the artists' own bodies are used, enabling an embodied, intimate response to technologies (in this instance Microsoft Kinect(s)) and spaces.This presentation will discuss their recent installation The Imagining of Things (exhibited at Huddersfield Art Gallery, in collaboration with Rotor, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and featured BBC Radio 3).
“the artists position themselves as shadows, ghosted forms, or reflections, their spectral other-selves existing as ethereal beings on the threshold of actual and virtual space: From a simple light source a phantasmagoric sequence of images emerges before the viewer, whose undeterminable human-animal forms flit feverishly and repetitively, intermittently transcending the boundaries of their projected terrain to become a glowing, oscillating Aurora Borealis on an adjacent wall, or a pixelated, revolving constellation. The accompanying indecipherable, clipped snippets of conversation, [produced in collaboration with composer MacDonald], whisper through the space adding to an atmosphere of disconcertion and discomfort.”[3]
It will also present the artists ambition to digitally capture performances in the homes of Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling and thus the creation of new, digital biomythographies.[4] Through temporal disruptions this new research will enable playful experimentation with narrative structure, visual and sonic data and allow the artists to consider how “…time is spontaneously identified with succession, and space with simultaneity”.[5]Biography
Brass Art is Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneké Pettican, a collaborative trio based in Manchester, Glasgow and Huddersfield. Working together since 1999, they have exhibited in Berlin, New York, Washington as well as Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Bloomberg Space London, the Tatton Park Bienale and The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester. They have presented their artistic research at numerous conferences including ISEA and Siggraph.1. Vidler, A. (1987). ‘The Architecture of the Uncanny: The Unhomely Houses of the Romantic Sublime’, Assemblage, No.3, July. MIT Press, p.7.
4. Ted Warburton defines the term coined by Audre Lourde, “Biomythology is the weaving together of myth, history and biography in epic narrative form, a style of composition that represents all the ways we perceive the world …It is a transgresssive form of writing taking the idea of crossing boundaries as the basis of its form.”