Recently we spent some time in
Leeds and got to go to the opening of Mark Martin’s solo show I WISH. The main work is a script that mines wishes from social media in
real-time. So there’s this continuous feed of wishes which gives a pretty
funny/sometimes tragic insight into the fanciful wants, desires, longings and pains
of (now) anonymous individuals. The background to the text is comprised of
numerous 3d digital renditions of dandelions floating through the air. The link
being that as dandelions turn to seed, children everywhere rush to pick
them, so that they can close their eyes, make a wish, and blow the seeds into
the air. The interesting aspect to this work is that none of the seeds have
been removed from any of dandelions we see in the projection; they are
untouched and fully intact. Perhaps this is a suggestion that sending these
wishes into the ether of twitter isn’t going to do anything, and actually doing
something would be more effective.
We’ve
also come up with a new idea for the isthisit?
residency since our previous idea was taken up by The Digital Artists Residency. When considering these online situations,
we find it interesting to consider the idea of place and time seeing as the traditional
notion of a residency is one where artists, academicians, curators, and all
manner of creative people are invited to take time and space away from their
usual environment and obligations. They’re supposed to provide a time of
reflection, research, presentation and/or production. The situation here is
slightly different in that the physical geography of the space doesn’t change
because it’s all through the Internet. Now for Millicent Place’s twitter
account it was a kind of month-long, duration performance work and the end
result as it were is going to be the twitter feed, almost frozen in time. For isthisit? we’re thinking about how it’s
an online space and how we could actually ‘travel’ to it. We’ve worked with the
game Sims before, specifically the artistic pathway, and so thought this would
be a perfect way of making it in line with a conventional artist residency. How
it would work on the site is still not quite ironed out but we’re thinking
perhaps either streaming it straight onto the website or perhaps video updates,
including finished works, we’ll see how it develops.
