Output details

Front room

‘Front Room’ is a networked telepresence installation presenting a mixed reality that merges space, time and culture in a Manchester/São Paulo domestic encounter or soap opera drama, where audience participants across the Atlantic join each other on a sofa, generating the uncanny sense of being at home yet in a foreign place. This converged ‘Front Room’ operates as a vacant space of potentiality, being nothing without the presence and the interactions of users, who create their own television programme by becoming the voyeurs of their own spectacle. The concept and structure is an open framework, where the artwork itself emerges only through the participation of users and through their lived experience at a given moment in space and time. Sources representing such phenomenological information, whether textual, oral or visual, become the pivotal points of interest in the research.

The installation was developed from an earlier practice-based research project ‘Telematic Vision’, which Sermon produced at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Germany, and was presented in its 20-year anniversary exhibition IMAGINING MEDIA@ZKM (2009–10), as well as becoming a permanent exhibit in the Experimental Science Museum Heilbronn (2009). Further developments in ‘Front Room’ were drawn from ‘On the Couch – Capturing Audience Experience’ by Rolf Wolfensberger (2009): ‘A Case Study on Paul Sermon’s “Telematic Vision”’, held by the Daniel Langlois Foundation Collection, Montreal.

‘Front Room’ was a world premiere created for the FutureEverything festival and ran between Contact Theatre Manchester and São Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art (MASP) in Brazil (2010), involving both programmed and ad hoc audience interaction, supported by the University of Salford, British Council, Northern Net and Arts Council England. A localised version of ‘Front Room’ was exhibited again for the opening of MediaCityUK, Salford (2011).

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