Living Room, Community Partner Response at the Dallas Museum of Art
September 25th – February 28th 2011. Center for Creative Connection, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas
Opening Reception is Thursday September 25 2010. Check out more details here.
The Dallas Museum of Art invites community partners to contribute to the Center for Creative Connections by responding to the Encountering Space exhibition. Faculty and alumni of the Division of Art and the Center of Creative Computation of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University (SMU) considered ideas about space as well as the interactive nature of C3 in the design of this immersive installation.
The project Living Room is the result of an intense collaborative process involving conversation, diverse perspectives, consideration of various models, and eventually the development of a coherent project taking on a life of its own. Living Room is as much about the nature of artistic collaboration as it is about a particular response to exploring space in and through art.
Living Room is an environment that actively combines physical and perceptual experiences. The space reacts to your presence through changes in its sensory aspects—its sound, its visual elements, and its bodily sense. Within a materially altered physical environment, a digital audio-visual system uses custom software to dynamically create an experience in sight and sound of 3D forms generated from mathematical expressions. The behavior of these forms is altered by the location and movement of persons in the room. This allows you to literally walk around the room integrating the physical and virtual space.
Living Room
We speak of inhabiting a space. This means, mostly, we assert our sovereignty over the space. We make the space work for us. We work on the space in order for the space to better do its work, to realize a purpose that is latent in it or that we have imposed upon it. But space is not a passive container that we occupy at will. The space reacts against us and on us. It constrains us and invites us to enter into a conversation. We respond to it and allow it to act upon us within limits.
Living Room is a physical space and a perceptual space, a reactive environment in which certain aspects—auditory and visual—alter in relation to your presence. Open yourself to the unexpected effects of space on your senses and your mind.
This space is in flux as you enter and re-enter. We can say it is impossible to enter this room again. You can place yourself inside the space, certainly. But, as this space is our host, we are like guests and must constantly adjust to the nuances presented to us by this dynamic environment.
The experience of engaging with Living Room is not necessarily that of inhabiting a space. It is a space of paradox: a room to be inhabited as well as a room that resists habitation. Living Room invites you to confront space while space confronts you.
Participating artists: Susan Barnett, MFA ‘08; Michael Corris, Chair, Meadows School of the Arts, Division of Art, Ira Greenberg, Director, Center of Creative Computation (Associate Professor Meadows School of the Arts and Lyle School of Engineering), Tom Lauerman, Instructor, Meadows; Teresa Rafidi, BFA; James Sullivan, Professor Meadows, and Martin Sweidel, Associate Dean Meadows.
Volunteers: Alisha Driggers, Meadows undergraduate, Katherine Frost, Meadows undergraduate, James Justinic, Meadows undergraduate, Leeanna Morris, BFA’10, and Olivia Smith, BFA ’10.
installation © teresa rafidi