Pleasure
Freedom Power
Exploring
the evolution of spectatorship in the digital era, an interdisciplinary
team of writers, artists and programmers have collaborated to produce
artworks in which the audience actively participates. Visitors register
their responses and continually re-make the content of the exhibits.
Inspired by the work of Alfred Hitchcock, questions of power, freedom
and desire are never far from the surface, emerging as metaphors
for the relationships between audience, artist and medium.
The
work poses important questions about transformations in visual culture
and gender: Are the roles performed by men and women on screen typically
active, passive or fluid? What happens to film when it moves from
the big screen to such devices as mobile phones? And does the apparently
accelerating re-use, control and modification of media by audiences
actually add up to real power?
The
exhibition is realised through an innovative cross-over between
experimental art practice, popular screen media and the presentation
conventions of education. Similarly the exhibition brings film language
into collision with surveillance systems, video games, social software
such as Wikis and blogs, and the commercial Internet of eBay and
Google. A deliberate contrast is drawn between this blurring of
boundaries and the polarised debates that have characterised the
study of new media, gender and power in the past. By taking a more
critical perspective, RePossessed aims to assess the extent to which
different audiences and emerging technologies might intersect to
offer new narrative freedoms.
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