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Title:
Untitled.
Artist: Matt
Hawthorne
Artist Located
in: Collingham, Newark
Format:
Video
Project description:
A set of coin operated binoculars that create an intimate viewing
experience so that a viewer can have a personal visual journey
through the environment that reveals the unseen, ignored and
peripheral. However this telescope will use small screen video and a
camera to allow an audience member to view the environment and
landscape following their own focus, but will gradually inject
stories (through fleeting images or text) which have arisen from the
dwelling research. The interventions will be subtle, open to
interpretation, and appropriate for all audiences. The material may
be conceptually, socially and politically challenging and will
generate a dialogue which the artist hopes to have with audiences in
response to the material.
Background Theme:
There are
essentially two modes of journeying, a focal mode (e.g. if we are
going to the shops we will exclude that which is outside our focus,
unless it forces its way in), and a peripheral mode which soaks in
the environment (Baudelaire’s flaneur). In 2003, I was commissioned
by the Radiator Festival, to produce an interactive video work for
the Lace Market area of Nottingham. The work I produced consisted of
a head mounted display and camera, which offered the viewer a framed
experience of the environment as they walked around. Using
transmitters and receivers, I live mixed images from an alternative
journey in the environment which opened up narratives of
dispossession in the urban environment, and made connection with
hidden histories and narratives, and injected the peripheral into
the focal.
Engagement:
The audience has to look
through the binoculars to see the locality but they see additional
factors which constitute our sense of place in the form of words and
texts, the artist will engage with the audience response to these
texts.
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