archives

Singapore.
Day three at ISEA 2008 starts with a paper by Nedine Kachornnamsong, who has developed an art installation for Copenhagen airport. She begins by reflecting on the purpose of such an installation - most travellers are likely just to move quickly and painlessly through the airport space, rather than linger and appreciate the art. What is the sense of place that exists in an airport?

Copenhagen is a hub for Scandinavian air travel, and acts as a transit airport for transfers into the nordic countries. It incorporates a great deal of Scandinavian design (including significant use of wood in interior spaces); for an airport, it's a very pretty space, but this may remain secondary to many travellers for whom the airport remains simply a transitional space. What is remembered, mostly, are the bad experiences travellers may have - delays, lost luggage, unfriendly staff.

Singapore.
The day three morning session at ISEA 2008 continues with Kate Southworth, who begins by noting the material impact of the network and its logic on everyday life. Some artists are now devising relational frameworks within which participative activities take place - governed by protocol and rules of engagement. Protocol is synonymous with the network itself, and there is no escape from it. Protocol has no interest in the content of the network, on the rules of exchange.

Singapore.
The post-lunch session on this third day of ISEA 2008 starts with Anke Jakob, whose interest is in the synthesis of digital image and physical space - one hot area for this at the moment is the visualisation of data in tangible objects, for example. Such approaches are hybrid, ambiguous, inconsistent, and equivocal; that is where the interest lies.

Anke now notes a number of examples for this - including the Galleria department store in Korea, whose entire facade acts as a large video screen; the facade of Moorfields Eye Hospital in London with its multicoloured lighting on myriads of aluminium louvres; and the facade of BIX at the Kunsthaus Graz, resembling something like a giant illuminated zeppelin. Further, clothes which act as wearable video displays fall into this category as well.

Singapore.
The post-lunch session on day three of ISEA 2008 continues with Rosanne Marshack. She begins by outlining the Buddhist idea of interdependence, where the existence of certain conditions brings about the existence of other conditions. All things are interconnected, in other words - and all phenomena are perceptual, based on previous experience.

Cause and effect can apply to different types of conditions - conditions of physical objects, living things and heredity, the workings of the mind, and behaviour and ethics. Rosanne's work with Rick Valentin explores such cause-and-effect chains. One such project was Eggpass, asking participants to pass on twelve numbered eggs from one to another, and the life stories of these eggs are on the Eggpass Website (one even has its own Friendster page).