Symposium: obstructions virtual gallery experiment
I refer back to the one-day symposium I attended in June 2018 called Encountering Things. Design and Theories of Things, organised by Betti Marenko and our MAGCD guest critic at the time Leslie Atzmon.
One of the speakers, Dr Peter Hall, discussed the 1934 Machine Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which displayed some six hundred objects of mechanised mass production on plinths and pedestals like modern sculpture, using the language of Plato and Saint Thomas Aquinas to contemplate their meaning and materiality.
I having been thinking about this approach for the obstructions, to remove them from their context and possibly reveal more clearly their materiality. I have started to build a basic gallery space in the Unreal games engine, under the tutelage of my son Gabriel, who is currently doing a BSc in games design and programming.
Building even this basic room was more labour-intensive than I’d anticipated. If you create a room that has a ceiling, then there is no light (Duh!) and you have to work hard at creating different light sources within the space before you can do anything else. My plan is to put in doorways leading to other rooms, in which I would experiment with virtual installations of selected obstructions.
My top 6 obstructions for this are: cones, hedges, tape, ‘crowd control’ barriers, velvet ropes and security guards; and I can hopefully get hold of ready-made assets to bring into Unreal to experiment with. This is my mood-board shopping list for them.