Output details

Drift

Drift was an interactive installation developed to inspire active and reflective engagement with digital media and its staging though the combination of rephotography and interactive design, incorporating and critiquing methods used in participatory art. It was designed as an exhibition that made space for active interaction and reflection by visitors, and that generated new knowledge and understanding about the ways interactive rephotography can operate. The gesturally organized rephotographic space produced was designed to provide a series of digital interventions in archival photography and to inspire viewers to share their own experiences.

Interactive rephotography is often used to explore ghosts and hidden narratives in urban spaces. Spaces that have seen significant cultural change are often evocative and have inspired sustained interaction pieces – notably Norman Klein’s exploration of Los Angeles in “Bleeding Through: layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986” project, (2003). Drift, drawing on this tradition, uses interactive rephotography, but this time not triggered by a mouse on a computer but by the presence (and relative absence) of the viewer. The exhibition attempts to suggest ways to experience the impossible histories of spaces which no longer exist, or that have seen great change. In this instance, locations used had seen waves of Italian and Chinese immigrants occupy the same space as authors, filmmakers and other cultural producers. These locations, holding importance to more than one of the communities now present, were identified, rephotographed and exhibited, specifically by employing performative/embodied movements to trigger movement through historical narratives. The accompanying sound was constructed from interviews and ambient recordings taken from historically relevant places and their residents.

In sum, the combined practices, methods, and showings of Drift represent an attempt to explore the development of methodologies for creating expanded or iterative histories of, and with, visual media as interactive media.