MEETING
WITH LAURA BELOFF & CARLE LANGE
at Cafe Il Moro, Oslo
30 August 2005
The first meeting with both my supervisors present.
The main topic of the meeting was to go over formal aspects of my project which I don't need to go into here. However discussion eventually turned to the final presentation of my project.
I am unwilling at this point to precisely define the final context of the presenataion of The Emotion Organ and the project, Mind, the gap. The reason being that the organ is an experimental instrument that is not yet constructed.It is difficult to assess how it will eventually function until the reconstruction process has moved forward to a point where it is possible to play with the inputs and outputs. My current aim is to construct a flexible instrument that is also durable - that won't pack down. By flexible I mean that it should be possible to re-program the instrument for different needs. By Additionally, the physical outputs of the organ should also be flexible, to some extent - especially with respect to spatial considerations of the output.
I explained how participating in collaborative artworks, most recently The 8th Sister and Imagining St Mary Magdalene provided an oppurtunity to try out some of the ideas and principles that emerge through the attempt to build an Emotion Organ help to get my ideas off the drawing board and into space. I find the feedback from such practices helpful in making decisions about how to proceed with my project. Three questions are bugging me at the current time:
Does it matter that the public does/did not express the experience of the work in synaesthetic terms?
Does it matter that the artist could not envisage/predict the various interpretations of the work?
Is a study of synaesthesia and live art mostly valuable as part of an artistic process?
If The Emotion Organ does not become something that the general public can describe in synaesthetic terms, has my project failed?
These questions have arisen because both the recent collaborative projects have taken place outside the normal arenas for art: an asylum church and gardens in North London, directly after the bombings, a small island community 50 km off the north coast of Norway.
Who were the public?
Answer: The church staff and congregation, asylum seekers, alcohilics and junkies, the vicar, some passers by. The local community including fishermen and women, boat builders, shopkeepers. Basically they have never heard of synaesthetics.
My current thought is to not panic! I have two strategies for presenting the organ at the end of next year:
The organ IS the live art performance:
Laura suggested that the organ could be sent in a box to an exhibition/performance
space and the receivers had to find out what to do with it.
The organ is the SUBJECT of a live art performance:
Carle suggested that the organ could be presented in the context
of a laboratory, preferably over several days.
The final conclusion was that some aspects of my project must be allowed to fail, and that the decision about the final presentation can be left to a later date.