A case study: Art as Attunement – EMAP Capacity Building Workshop

On Thursday, 10 May 2023, the WRO Art Center hosted an EMAP capacity-building workshop focussing on practices and tactics relating to building Artist/Audience interconnectedness. This workshop was part of a cycle of meetings, Przewody Sztuki (the Art Wires), which preceded the WRO 2023 Fungible Content Biennale.

Content of session:

The study of potential-building was based on a number of works selected from the WRO programme. The session aimed to present some aspects of media works from exactly this perspective. In essence, not necessarily intentionally, although immanent for the discipline, they include a set of various communication devices. In the exhibition process these can be understood as a sensitive system, a system of interaction with the viewer; a system in which the viewer also exists as the attunement factor – with the self, the work and its synergy with the surroundings. During the workshop at the WRO Biennale participants share their experiences and complement the mutual knowledge of the methods of attunement played out in art space based on its practices.

During the collaborative session, we have showcased five examples of Artists working with different sensory modalities and communicative channels. Each participant employed a form of performative lecture, sharing their divergent methods and perspectives on artwork/audience relation building.

The participants in this session:

Introduction: Dominika Kluszczyk and Dagmara Domagała (WRO Art Center team members)
Moderator: Anna Olszewska (HEGEL IND representative)

Artists:

Anna Pompermaier & Cenk Güzelis (MeAndOtherMe) in collaboration with Valdemar Danry
#SocialDinnerEvent #ExploratoryObjects #SpatialStorytelling #LiveMixedReality #AI-drivenDesign https://meandother.me

So Kanno #Artificial Life https://www.kanno.so

Dasha Ilina #DIY #painrelief #ASMR https://dashailina.com/work.php

Rosa Menkman #Time #Alternative vision #Angel history https://beyondresolution.info/ABOUT

Monika Masłoń #VR as a medium for telling emotions http://monikamaslon.art

CASES

Short presentations by five artists on the practices and methods they use to establish relationships with their audiences.
The panel started with a story about building relationships through feasting together (AI hosted dinner – MeAndOtherMe), then, through games and economic exchange, the conversation moved to Digital Artificial Life (NFT), reproduction and living in robot homes (Kazokutchi – So Kanno, Akihiro Kato, Takemi Watanuki). Dasha Ilina took us to the Centre for Technological Pain, a project proposing DIY solutions to health problems caused by digital technologies. Rosa Menkman produced an interactive audio-visual narrative to recount the mission of the Angel of History, but, unlike Walter Benjamin, turning his face not to the past but to the future. The final artist, Monika Masłoń, concluded the panel with her experience of loss of control as a medium for exploring emotions in VR.

Below are some highlights from the artists’ talks:
Dasha Ilina’s idea for communication relies on tutorials and various forms and manuals, as she comments on self-defence tutorials retrieved from YouTube:

“A lot of macho guys telling you how to protect yourself” – I took the tactics that they were using and reappropriated them in order to use them against people who are not careful walking down the street while using their phones.[…] so I’ve enjoyed observing people watching YT tutorials slide by slide and starting to organise themselves”.

So Kanno aims to elicit analogies between artificial life and social behaviour, as he presents Kazokutchi swarm robots:

I’ve brought the robot from the installation, which we do not do normally do, but it is to show what it is like. It’s an a life NFT robot and it’s not perfect. Sometimes they fail and it’s like us! They’re so needy and they fail in many tasks, they’re not perfect but everyone knows that life is not perfect […] and usually when you use robots you aim for some kind of perfection. I think that the western image of the robot is that it aims for perfection, like in industry or a factory where they do something perfectly without human intervention. However it’s a bit like us – they fail, so that’s when imagination could start, if you look at the swarm you think of society in a metaphoric way, and if you are in front of the installation you may imagine you can project, what if…? and then you could go to some XX XY, male female thing, and you could go to some political level and so on.

Monika Masłoń performed a live sketch session to talk about how a medium impacts emotional distance:

I observe the moment when the medium reveals itself, moments when some kind of technical glitches occur, something is not working, spoiling immersion […] like going through the objects. […] And changing the medium makes a difference in terms of effective communication: Today I will change VR for RV – real virtuality. “In control negative” emotions were the foundation of the piece, not the story behind it. […] Sometimes emotions are hard to express in language, so I think about equivalents. As part of my artistic practice, I change the emotions into visual form. Media are creating this situation of making a safe distance; the distance is quite big and it’s safe for me, my emotions etc. but the consequence of it is that the distance is creating a very small impact. […] And then I’ve discovered another way that is through VR, where, with different senses engaged, distance becomes much shorter for the participant and at the same time the impact is much stronger.

CONCLUSIONS

Throughout our session we have gained valuable knowledge on prompting interaction between the artist and the audience within various modalities.
One observation we made during this event is the divergence between the artists’ presentation content and the performative mode they have applied. While the presentations have traditionally focused on the process of the works’ conceptualisation and design, the performative plan has introduced methods of doing around the design process. The methods chosen anticipated the ways the artists relate to their external environment, therefore bringing to light the modalities that are attuned to their artwork, establishing communication with the public.

On a more general note, we have concluded that artists focus solely on the design process, leaving audience-relation to the curation team. At the WRO Center, we use the experiment with performative artist talks as a way of collecting methods enabling alternative, multimodal and reliable modes of media artwork presentation.