OBSERVER PARTICIPATION
As artists we see ourselves as both observers and participators in the works we create, and in recent years we have worked to bring the public and our artistic collaborators into works that we call entanglements. These investigations have led us into partnerships with musicians, dancers, writers and teachers. We have become filmmakers, writers, photographers and even computer programmers.
ENTANGLEMENTS
In our recent exhibition in the Pompidou Centre, Pourquoi pas Toi? we set up three environments that were both studios of creation and exhibition galleries. These studios were more or less empty and it was clear that without the participation of visitors, nothing would happen; the empty studios would remain, literally, empty. But once visitors enter the studio, is it enough for them to be present, watching, for the studio to come to life? Our invitation to them did not specify their involvement, there were no instructions. We brought them to the threshold between observation and participation, where they could step in and out of both worlds. As artists, we had set up the rooms with cameras and projectors and infrared lamps and created the computer programmes to manage these entanglements. Were we observers then? Were we participants?
One story from the show is worth telling here. We had set up a theremin in Studio 3. Our objective was to focus the attention of the visitor on the instrument long enough for the ‘stillness’ camera to recognise them (the computer filtered moving things out of the image so a person could only appear after several seconds of immobility). In the first weeks the installation seemed to make little impact, most people moving through too quickly to appear. But as the exhibition progressed there were more and more teenagers queuing up behind the theremin. Each of them would walk up to the instrument, grab hold of the vertical antenna with both hands (producing a high pitched squealing sound from the instrument) and watch their image appear on the screen. After a period they would let go, step away from the instrument and watch their image disappear. It was clear to them that contact with the antenna was producing their image, and anyone who tested this (myself included) could see that the hypothesis worked! The invigilators installed a notice asking the public not to touch the antenna, but fortunately we persuaded them to remove this.
Our Moving Dublin project threw us into several such entanglements, leading us to results we had scarcely imagined when we set out. In Spring 2008 we worked with a group of 17 year olds in Clondalkin, a working class suburb of Dublin. We gave each of them a professional camera to film their daily trip home from school. The essential paradox of filming everyday journeys is that once you point a camera at something, it ceases to be everyday. People are inhibited by the camera, or they perform for it, and the camera is naturally drawn to ‘remarkable’ things: beautiful shots and strange happenings. Rather than buttoning up and presenting their best behaviour to the surveying eye of the camera, the teenagers competed with each other in salacious zeal. This leads us to another paradox of filming the everyday. Do we use the compromising footage, with possible breaches of privacy or defamation? Is the alternative to act as censors and suppress it? The school maintained the power to suppress the film if they saw fit, and given the nature of the material, this seemed like a real possibility. In June, though the school year was over, we called a final emergency session with the class. How exactly could we edit it so that it would be acceptable to the school, while exploiting the potential of the footage? Almost all of the students turned up, and we spent several hours turning over the possibilities, asking them be the judges of the moral and artistic dilemmas. The result is The Observer Effect, a classroom experiment, a movie, a glimpse into the carefully dissimulated private world of today’s urban teenagers, and a demonstration of how the play of observation and participation can turn artistic practice inside out.
Earlier the same year we were working with dancers in Dublin’s Inner City. One rainy Saturday morning in February we brought six of them into a bleak little park behind Sean McDermott Street. The dancing drew the attention of some local people who got involved, leading to an 11-minute short film which we eventually called Not a Fish. The film sparked controversy, some people judging it objectionable, or just dreary, while others found it exhilarating and provocative. There ensued a lengthy and heated correspondence, which we published in our book Moving Dublin. The central point in such entanglements is to follow them where they want to go. It was the very last line of the correspondence which gave the film its name. Signed by our 80 year old friend and mentor Eléonore Schöffer, responding to my own contribution, in which I described feeling like a fish while I was filming the event:
... go on searching and creating, as creation is the "mirror" in which the artist can find the answer to the question: "Who am I?" Not this, not this, not this, and, of course...not a fish.
