Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Liverpool John Moores University
Mensch
Public work in ten parts using bluetooth transmissions commissioned for Edinburgh International Festival 2009 as part of The Enlightenments - the official visual arts programme of the festival, curated by Julianna Engberg.
This piece was made in response to an invitation by the curator, Juliana Engberg, with whom I had previously worked in making a work for the Melbourne festival in 2000, to participate in the curated visual art programme of the Edinburgh International Festival 2009. I chose to continue a strain of research commenced with Engberg for Melbourne with a work that would insinuate itself into the public realm and establish a critically incisive and poetic response to the theme of the exhibition and to its own status as an artwork.
I wrote a series of short texts relating to the overall theme of the exhibition, which was to do with the character of the enlightenment in Edinburgh, using the figures of pseudo enlightenment men and often comically subverting their supposedly upstanding character. There are thirty texts altogether divided into ten groups of three. These groups were each assigned to one of ten festival exhibition venues from which they were transmitted via a bluetooth transmitter connected to a dedicated PC to the mobile phones of passers by and gallery visitors. Phones would alert their owners to incoming messages and ask if they wished to receive them; an affirmative answer led to each text being transmitted as an image file that could be viewed in the screen of the phone and stored, thus making it possible for visitors to the festival to collect the texts as they navigated the overall festival exhibition and look at them in situ or indeed after the event. The work therefore also provided some insights into how visitors to a city-wide exhibition, such as a festival or Biennial, might make sense creatively of their passage through the city.
Accompanying publication ISBN 978-0-9805778-7-7
