Incident by Tessa Elliot

3rd July - 15th August 1999

Digital Artist in Residence 1999

The Towner Art Gallery & Local Museum

My position as digital artist in residence at The Towner Art Gallery was two-tiered;

Educational support for Tessa Elliott’s Incident, a multimedia installation; facilitating interaction, discussion & understanding of Art & Technology. I constructed & provided creative technical demonstrations, guided tours & talks within the gallery.

Artist in residence creating Insite, a digital piece of work for the Internet, in response to the installation & The Towner Collection.

This opportunity offered an undeniably rich experience for myself, the venue & the public.

The people visiting the Gallery

The number of people who attended guided tours & talks through Incident ranged from one-to-one sessions, to groups of up to 40 language students. One day delivered 5 groups of 20 enthusiastic Chinese language students. Over the 7 week period approximately 1, 200 people gained an enhanced experience of Incident, the collection & contemporary art per se. For Insite 70 members of the public offered their own perspectives on paintings, prints & sculptures on display.

The type of people I interacted with was very broad indeed, ranging from 6 to 104 years of age. They were holiday-ing family groups, language students, teachers, artists, retired professionals, local youths & generally curious people. Some were visiting for the first time & others regular locals, but many of the people I interacted with returned on more than 1 occasion during the residency. An elderly couple returned from Hastings where they had previously joined me for a Digital Workshop at Hastings Museum during Simon Poulter’s Microhenge. Visitors came from a variety of different cultures & places; China, Japan, Egypt, US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Romania & Czechoslovakia.

Their comments

I enjoyed the technology

Very accessible for children

The Artist in Residenceí explanations & expertise were clear & helpful

Verbal discussion by guide was excellent

Very thought provoking, Informative

I particularly liked being able to put my comments down on screen

It feels good to be able to put something back into the arts

How lovely to have somebody to listen to what I think about it

I didn’t realise I knew so much about Art

Its amazing, I’ll keep coming back to this painting, now

Benefits to me as a practising Artist

1) Self management skills, realistically judging what could be achieved in the time available, with the equipment & skills I had to hand. Identifying the major assets available to me; the installation, the collection & the public.

2) Time management working with the public. Planning scheduled talks throughout the day, particularly with large booked & unannounced groups. Balancing Public time with Creative & Technician time.

3) Working with a team of professionals; the Artist Tessa Elliott & Jons, The Townerís staff, & various workshop leaders in the same space, responding to the installation.

4) Develop & apply interpersonal & communication skills with the public, other artists & staff / colleagues. I was honoured to feel a part of the galleryís staff team throughout the Residency period.

5) Insight into the daily running of an Arts Venue, the support & research required from the Curator & staff, when accessing & creating work in response to a galleryís collection; in terms of copyright, ownership, reproduction, handling, & understanding; particularly when proposing to enter that work into relatively new digital technology (namely the Internet). Insight into what it takes to successfully install & maintain a multimedia piece, on a practical, material sense as well as conceptual, with public audience awareness.

6) The ability & opportunity to discuss works of Art with the public, particularly on a one-to-one basis. I discovered there is so much to learn from listening to people. I learnt that a single image offers as many different perspectives as there are people coming to it and as many moments in time for that person to return to it.

7) An opportunity to assess Art in the context of New Technology. For Insite each viewer became a window, offering a new view, a fresh perspective with each new moment. The Art piece in the collection/ under review, became an inexhaustible text, of narrative upon narrative. Within Insite each word, abstracted from the viewerís interpretation, is an image file. Text & Image have equal status. As an Artist my role was more akin to Search Engine or Curator, networking & collating information, & Browser. Art became narrative, Viewer became Window & the Artist becomes Browser; a specific window enabling us to read & interpret information, through which snippets of a bigger picture become visible.

Benefits to my work

Opportunity to develop skills I had recently gained through a Certificate in Multimedia (Curating the Digital Arts).

Opportunity to show & discuss my recent digital work with a wide variety of people, from a broad spectrum of ages & backgrounds. Most enriching an experience, and vital feedback for an Artist, directly from the public.

Direct access to the Towner Collection, particularly Henry Mooreís Elephant Skull prints & sketches.

Experience, observation & conversations with the Artist Tessa Elliott, & Jons.

Insite: The Web Site

1999 / 2000

Dion Ellis

What: An interactive online insight to The Towner’s Collection, through the inspiring words of its visitors. A creative demonstration of what people see in Art today & why. An exploration of Narrative.

Insite contains over 100 pages of image & animated text, presenting over 100 different perspectives on 36 works of Art, through the words of 70 visitors to The Towner Art Gallery.

An exploration of interpretation, a play with words & meaning

How: I jotted down the words of a member of the public as they stood before a work of Art within the Towner Art Gallery, responding on their own terms to the piece they had selected. It became significant that these were the words of the general public, who were responding to what was actually before them, rather than what was expected to be there.

Using HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language, a text-based language specific to the Internet), Dreamweaver & Photoshop, I have presented Image & Text only. The texts are snippets of conversations, selected narratives. The narratives can be accessed via 3 different routes; through an interactive surreal poem, a list of names of those who have been quoted (each consenting), or a list of the collection (by title & name of artist). The key words abstracted from each narrative are hypertext links to their respective narrative pages, displaying image & animated text. I selected key words in order that the reader/user would not easily assume which image it may refer to. Many conflicting words & associations were used to describe the same painting.

The Abstract Poem Page displays 5 of 100 key words at any moment. As the user rolls over a word, another is replaced, & so the user is invited to explore text & narrative. This screen always opens with the same 5 words. Depending on the level of interaction, the user/viewer could experience different sequences of text every time they interact. The words are image files. They alone fill this particular screen.

Why: Tessa Elliottís Incident, (an exploration of language, image & new technology) begins with Norbert Lynton’s interpretation of the Towner’s collection. The Art Criticís words were selected by Tessa. She then approached the image in question, and associated those words with a detail or ëincidentí within the frame, according to her interpretation / reading of both the words &the visual work. Each visual detail & its corresponding text became the building blocks of information with which a computer was programmed to be able to visually interpret any image placed before it. The computer could only make an analysis of any new visual data (what it can ‘see’ before it), according to what it already knows. Itís knowledge bank comprised of (200+) visual & corresponding textual pieces or files of information from the Townerís Collection. The digital interpretations of any new imagery were reconstituted information. The words it projected back were said to be akin to an abstract poem, derived literally through an analysis of interpretation. The process of interpretation of information could be seen to be both pure (mathematical) & complex (creative). Incident provided an opportunity for the viewer to observe the process of interpretation as both creative & scientific. The Gallery space became more akin to the Artist’s studio where the audience is invited to experience, observe & participate in the creative process. The abstract poem, projected in the final chamber of the gallery, often appeared to make no literal sense in itself, although the words would convey meaning to the reader, who was left to interpret the whole process themselves.

I wanted to hear their interpretations of both the installation & the collection. Tessa created a new language through which a computer was programmed to interpret images. For me the use of language, interpretation & communication became paramount; this is what was under surveillance, through Incident. Language is expansive not definitive. There is no single perspective, or interpretation. It would be false to assume so.

We are programmed to place meaning. Words (like images) are not definitive. They are open to interpretation. Therefore our means of communication is inherently more creative a process than could be imagined.

Through Insite I endeavoured to explore Art as narrative. Narrative is a cognitive process that organises human experiences into temporally meaningful episodes (Polkingham, 1988). I became interested in those experiences, peopleís perceptions & the meaning people place on Art.

When: February 2000 the launch of Insite online.

Where: http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/insite

Possibility of The Towner’s own web site.

Links: Henry Moore Foundation web site. Artists Newsletter. All above web sites.

Further Online research throughout the year 2000.

Future: Towner Art Gallery & Local Museum research into the costs of producing Insite Cdrom for public use & sale within the gallery.

I intend to develop the poetry page of Insite using Flash & Dynamic HTML. I intend to research into the costs of creating international interpretations for Insite, both online & as a Cdrom. I intend to create a second version of Insite for Pallant House in Chichester.

Marketing: Year 2000

Web site address to Towner visitors, via The Towner’s own publicity.

Advertisement in relevant arts organisation’s publicity, mailout & newsletters, eg: Lighthouse, BN1, Fabrica, University of Brighton’s Artyfacts, South East Arts, The Guardian’s Online Sections & The Guide, Computer Arts magazine & an article in the Artists Newsletter.

by Dion Ellis