LABS

On the Couch – Capturing Audience Experience By Rolf Wolfensberger

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Leonardo Abstract Services (LABS) 2008-2009
On the Couch – Capturing Audience Experience. A Case Study on Paul Sermon’s ‘Telematic Vision’

The thesis is a contribution to current debates on preservation strategies for electronic media artworks and is based on a case study on Paul Sermon’s interactive networked installation Telematic Vision (1993 – ). It thematises a shift from object-centered and artist-informed strategies of preventive conservation and documentation towards an approach laying emphasis on assessing the impact and the context of the artwork being in a state of performance. The case study is designed as a phenomenological research and attempts to test various complementary audiovisual and text-based qualitative methods focusing on recording and documenting audience experience and the reflective accounts of the audience’s perception of contemporary artworks. The applied methods in the test case have been adapted from neighboring fields like oral history, visual anthropology, cognitive and social sciences and museum studies. The chosen package of methods comprises a combination of two variants of video observation capturing the audience’s behavior whilst using the installation, a series of video-cued recall interviews with participants and polling by a specific questionnaire. The approach has generated a rich panorama of experiential eyewitness accounts and states that such sources yield vital information for the preservation of such time-based and process-oriented artworks like Telematic Vision which emerge only through the lived experience of the audience. But experiential evidence is only useful for preservation issues in unison with other established approaches guaranteeing the integrity of the state of notation of the artwork and providing the material and contextual parameters for its re-presentation. The thesis attempts to fill the experiential gap in a holistic approach to preserve electronic media artworks.

Degree: MA MediaArtHistories
Year: 2009
Pages: 110 (incl. DVD)
University: Danube University Krems, Austria
Supervisor: Prof Dr. Oliver Grau
Email: oliver.grau@donau-uni.ac.at
Supervisor 2: Alain Depocas, Director of CR+D at the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Montreal
Language: English
Dept: MediaArtHistories, Department of Image Sciences
Copyright: Rolf Wolfensberger
Lang_author: German, English, French
Email: rowo@lorraine.ch
Keywords: audience experience, electronic media art, preservation, documentation, variable media, oral history

LEONARDO ABSTRACTS SERVICE (LABS) is a comprehensive collection of Ph.D., Masters and MFA thesis abstracts on topics in the emerging intersection between art, science and technology.

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Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.