Heidi Tikka: Situations4x: Interfacing with the Everyday Lives of Three Families in Helsinki
Title:
- Situations4x: Interfacing with the Everyday Lives of Three Families in Helsinki
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Artist Statement:
The lives of three families in the Helsinki region will be brought together into an audiovisual presentation using MMS narratives. The stories will unfold in three adjacent windows on the project website and in the Kiasma video projection. A low fourth window is open for audience participation…
Situations4x takes as its starting point the fluidity of MMS imaging in constructing real time visual narratives as actual events unfold. The low image resolution, which favours details and close-up images rather than panoramic views, alongside the instantaneity of the image capture, are here developed to create a practice that enables a group of people to be virtually present in each other’s lives.
The time stamp that accompanies every MMS message is, in the Situations4x expriment, used as the key structural element. On one hand, it is used as the that automatically organizes an image sequence into a narrative sequence according to the time. On the other hand, the connection of any particular event to certain date is broken and replaced with a thematic connection. In the space of audiovisual presentation, the families, as well as the participating audience, experience together the variations of an imaginary summer day in August 2004. Thematically, Situations4x exposes the invisible everyday lives of the three families for public view and participation. But as the camera phones begin to circulate among the family members, it may also highlight differences in the ideas of what constitutes a “family”.
