Artspace Research Commission: Hijack

HIJACK is a commission offering artists and curators the opportunity to make radical architectural/artistic interventions in the Artspace building; responding to its history and location and hijacking its usual purposes to create an unusual find for a public event.extract from ARC: HIJACK project brief

[…] I will research, develop and install a series of small interactive interventions within the Artspace building and immediate surroundings. These contraptions will be responsive to the presence of people in these spaces. Where possible, I’d also like them to resonate with the stories of those that have passed through the various histories of the building.

Using a variety of sensors such as proximity, motion, heat and humidity sensors, mechanisms will move, shake, rattle, roll, reveal, hide, strike, ping, scrape, dangle and waft as people move into their awareness. […]

Itchy questions I want to scratch at:

  • What does it feel like to have a building watching you?
  • How does this flip our assumptions for Open Heritage Day if a) the fabric of the building is woven through with technology and, rather than people going to look at the building, the building is looking at the people?
  • What playfulness can be instigated and how will this result in people moving their bodies through the spaces of the building?

Extract from my proposal

Constructing indoor, fixed constructions was something of a new context for me since starting to work with sensors and physical computing, although I did find that my starting point was very similar: what spaces do I want to amplify and what movement/behaviour would I like to instigate in the audience? I identified a wishlist of places (non-places) and the sorts of flows and pauses I wanted to try and instigate within them. From these I was able to get 5 devices designed, made and installed ready for the Heritage Open Day weekend:

Tweeting Members’ Room – Automatically logging a selection of activities in the (off-limits) Members’ Room and publishing their occurrence on the internet.
Ghost (Town) Tapper – Making the fabric of the basement resonate with the echoes of the past. Hoping to instigate a bit of a boogie.
Dodge Errol – Animated decoupage cobboulage. Encouraging people to hang out in the pseudo gallery space in the corridor by the loos.
Trapeze Monkey – Turning the empty space of the Community Room into something of a ballroom. Can groups of visitors coordinate inaction to entice a monkey down from the rafters?
Secret Police Disco – Something that must be hunted out or discovered completely by chance. Marking the threshold to the basement with a reference to a Police social club.

The Artspace building and humans were both a delight to work with and for. So many stories; so many questions; so much enthusiasm. It was also great to be making things for the Heritage Open Day audience and to able to make things that, on the surface at least, were very playful.

As ever, though – and as all research projects should – we unearthed more questions with our experiments and noticings. Save the date of Wednesday the 19th of September for an evening Answer and Question session (different to a Question and Answer session!), where together we shall be looking at what happened, what might have happened, and what we might want to try and make happen next…

In the meantime, I’ll be adding further blog posts here with initial documentation and observations.