Exhibitions | Straitjacket Embrace!
Showing: Thu 20th Sep - Sun 21st Oct
Artists Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat create ‘meeting places' in public spaces in their work. In those ‘meeting places' they use a combination of online and offline media, such as the internet, live-tv, wireless and surveillance devices, newspaper and billboards, video and urban screens as well as GSM (Global Systems for Mobile communications) and locative media. In their performances and installations, Lancel and Maat invite their audience to experiment and play with these social technologies while reflecting on their own perception of identity, community and alienation. It is research into contemporary social systems in a mediated society.
Straitjacket Embrace!
Straitjacket Embrace! deals with experiences of the fear and desire of others in public spaces and the ways that we feel socially connected or disconnected. In our mediated society the public space is no longer a space we can leave or exclude. Through wireless technology - chat, mail, GSM, RFID - public space is everywhere; in our homes, our beds, and even in our bodies.
For Straitjacket Embrace! Lancel and Maat conducted interviews with people who in some way feel excluded, like people living illegally in the city, prisoners and those with mental health issues associated with the West London Mental Health Trust. The main question asked was 'what is a safe space?' The interviews lead to personal and intimate stories about the (im)possibility of creating their own safe space and the often total dependency for this on strangers.
Contemporary public spaces with their emphasis on control using surveillance devices and internalised surveillance systems, restrict our (body)space and direct how we move, like in a straitjacket. At Watermans, Lancel and Maat have created an interactive straitjacket, containing a ‘fictional relational space'. This relational space has been created sonically around the interviews while visually creating an immediate surrealistic Panopticon. This interactive straitjacket is wearable, like a second skin and provides the wearer with both the experience of play and a phobic self-surveillance system. Please try it on!
Surveillance/ RFID
The interactive straitjacket makes use of 'invisible technology' called RFID (radio frequency identification). RFID combines a unique sensor-with-chip identity that is readable and monitored by computer. RFID creates a wireless network, nowadays used for (product) control and logistics. It is similar to a barcode and today this tiny little chip can be found almost everywhere - in our clothes, our mobile phones, under the skin of our pets and most commonly in Oyster cards. Through RFID, anonymous strangers can trace your private life wherever you go without you ever knowing it. RFID turns private life and our bodies into a commodity. In Straitjacket Embrace! Lancel and Maat turn this system upside down into a private play-zone.
How does it work?
In the Gallery the Straitjacket hangs from the ceiling surrounded by camera's and audio and video projections. You are invited to put the straitjacket on and find both it's enclosing functionality as well its natural invitation "to embrace yourself". Invisibly in the front of the jacket Lancel and Maat have placed not one unique RFID sensor-with-chip but a hundred of them for you to play with. You 'trace' yourself by putting both your arms in the jacket and embracing yourself (through a smart hidden little antenna invisibly attached to your hand in the jacket). By softly caressing yourself the tags open their information for you. With your left hand you activate projected images of yourself, live and pre-recorded, creating a surveillance system or Panopticon turned mad. Your right hand turns your body in a multi-channel radio-archive. Your body seems to contain intimate whispering voices of different people telling stories about trying to be safe by being invisible and uncontrollable. The straitjacket is both a self-surveillance system and a tool for storytelling; creating an audio-visual, immersive environment through embracing yourself.
more info on http://www.lancelmaat.nl/
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