Where we’re at :: a colaborative art project

Yesterday was the opening night of the “Where we’re at” at the Big Picture, Tallaght. It’s the culmination of 3 weeks of hard work as part of the Creative Campus project, a project that facilitated graduate artists to create site specific works for an underused space in Tallaght.

I got involved in the project at the start of the summer when the original call for artists went out. After a rocky start, with a second call being issued, we got properly underway at the beginning of the month. I got to work in a group with 3 fine art graduates and a graduate of the masters that I taking at the moment (Music and Media Technology). Our group was interested in interactivity and both of the pieces that we created were based on the idea of having the audience interact with the piece.

The first piece was a piece that would facilitate the audience member to re-experiencing Tallaght. To do this we made binaural audio recordings (recordings that recreate the sense of space where the audio was recorded) and took images from various place around Tallaght. The images were displayed a large television screen and the audio was listened to via headphones. The listener could select sounds by touching different photos on a touchscreen and re-experience some of the places that they inhabit on a daily basis. The piece also allowed the user to mix sounds from several locations with a corresponding mixture of the images.

The second piece facilitated interaction between the gallery space and the outside of the building. It consisted of a live audio and video feed between the spaces. A live feed from the front of the building was projected onto the wall of the gallery and a feed from the gallery was projected onto the window. Microphones and speakers were setup in both locations, with the speakers on the outside being stuck to the inside of the glass and transmitting the sound through the window.

Both of these pieces were a real success. People really engaged with the video link and had a lot of fun talking to people in the other space and, for some reason, would spend ages looking at live footage where nothing was happening. At one point there was even a queue to use the binaural exhibit. All the attendees seemed to really enjoy the exhibits and seemed to get what we were trying to achieve which was amasing.

Over all, the night was a great success, everyone had a lot of fun and there was a great turnout. Roll on the next project.

These pieces were created by Sara Amido, David Collier, Thom Conaty, Simone Corr and Shane Finan.

“Where we’re at” runs from the 16th to the 22nd of September in the Big Picture, Tallaght.

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