Extirpation


Report as of Saturday
September 29, 2007, 8:51 am
Filed under: Thoughts

We’ve been getting great feedback from people. Its been really gratifying to have people come, interact and really engage with the work. I think that people have really enjoyed it, momentum has been building as people bring friends and partners to come play.
Its been fascinating to hear peoples thoughts on what it’s about, and also about where it could go, what would be nice to change.
I think we need to look at making the relationships more obvious – some sort of ‘hook’ for people to initially engage with. A lot of people tend to be in a gallery modality and stand back to observer, rather than enter the space – perhaps some sort of initial interaction would encourage people to engage a bit more.
An interesting thought was the politic behind our message. We honestly hadn’t considered the politics behind it, more focusing on the relationships and parallels with ecological concerns.
People do like seeing their faces on the leaves, and for the most part appreciate the circularity of it, and also the subtle blending of face and leaf, rather then being more overt about it.
We got some great documentation footage thanks to Sascha’s filming, which will be great to pitch to various conferences, festivals and galleries. ANAT, one of our supporters, came along and I think were very pleased with what we had done.
Something we will look at immediately is getting in touch with a group at Sydney University who develop software and programs for ecological accounting – by area, by industry etc. It will be very interesting to feed in more real world data to the mix.
Though from an artistic standpoint, we have to be careful that it doesn’t become so big and monumental that it loses the personal story that this version has. I quite like the small immediacy of this version, it seems a bit more empowering to the individual, rather than deluging them with the vastness of the ecological problems the planet is facing. We hope that the work sparks an interest in the issues and that they will investigate further. We have resolved to upgrade this website, and put a lot more information and links to scientific data on it, hopefully becoming a mini-portal.
Some people were wondering about a more photo-real sort of look for the piece, which we had certainly considered, but rejected because we didn’t think a/ we could do the natural world justice and b/ its not a real representation of the environment, it is a parallel, an interpretation . It parallels the manmade with the natural. Though we are interested in varying the system – more creatures, more varieties of plants and also putting in the primary producers, which are amongst the first to be affected in any given system.


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