GMU:Artists Lab IV/Daria Dordina/Task 3

In my opinion, it is important first of all to determine what a "media project in the city" is and what it is aimed at. On the one hand, we can talk about objects of art as something that implies the active participation of city residents in the functioning of the installation. On the other hand, a "media project in the city" can be a personal exploration of urban space. It seems to me that these are two completely different approaches. We either offer the visitors to become a part of the game themselves, or we demonstrate to them a rather complicated and documented process done by the artist.

The first approach assumes that the object should be understandable at any level of involvement in the project topic. The visitor should not spend time comprehending the concept in order to take part in the action. At the same time, such installations also provide food for thought during just simple observation. It is important that visitors can show their individuality when they play or somehow interact with the object. It seems to me that in this case technological effectiveness is not necessary and even unwanted. The object should be simple, egalitarian and talk about understandable topics: examples show that the common basis for such topics is human life. Presentation examples: Sand Box, Before I die, Career Path, Two Too Large Tables, Moment - performatives Spazieren, Conversation Bubble. Projects are initializing communication during participation. Sufficiently sophisticated technologies may appear in this type of facility only if the facility is not placed in an urban environment. In any case, people are allowed to simply watch what is happening, as in the Zoom Pavilion example. Technology needs a guard and a control center.

The second approach can allow the use of rather complex concepts that are completely divorced from the everyday life of people. The presentation includes such examples: visualization of a WiFi signal using a long exposure photo, Coffee Seeks its Own Level, all the experiments with wearable devices. All these examples are a kind of art laboratory experiments with interesting results that are exhibited in museums (on the Internet?). The complexity of such systems must be reasonable. If we conduct our personal research, what is it dedicated to? Why is it carried out in this way? From the viewer's point of view: if art wants to be isolated, how does it justify it? In what ways can this experiment be recorded? In any case, I think that such a separation into poles is more likely to work not as a division of works into 2 groups, but as a distribution of them in a coordinate system, where one axis is the involvement of the viewer, the second is an individual experiment.

For me personally, the question of which strategy to prefer depends on what I want to say with this or that job. Accordingly, the choice of criteria varies from case to case. But, probably, in any case, the most important thing for me is to somehow reflect my associations, feelings and thoughts regarding the object that I am engaged in.

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It seems to me that the problem with the Software exhibition was partially that in fact, it takes quite a lot of time to comprehend the new. At the moment reinforced concrete was invented, it was still not understood as a tool to create a completely different type of architecture. Another type of architecture was followed by a different typology of the city, and after it - a different structure of society. And on the contrary: when in the USSR architects realized what volumetric expressive means are fraught with reinforced concrete and began to design and build houses with a flat roof and wide windows - construction technology and economics still did not allow achieving the simple requirements of flat roofs not leaking, and wide windows not freezing rooms. Everything happens, in fact, quite slowly. Therefore, it’s rather strange to read about “The computer has only been used to copy aesthetic effects easily obtained with the use of conventional media, although the computer does its work with phenomenal speed and eliminated considerable drudgery. The use of computers in the arts has yet to produce anything approaching entirely new aesthetic experience ".