“Bare Island” by Josh Harle
Image from realtimearts.net
Title:
- Bare Island
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
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Artist Statement:
Bare Island is a work in a series of interactive video pieces each set at a different geographical site. The works run on a tablet, and allow the participant to navigate through a cloud of digital images corresponding to the viewpoints of the photographs used to build the work. These images suggests the original space through their distribution. Motion through the cloud and direction-of-view are controlled using the tablet’s touch-screen interface through swipe gestures, and after a period without interaction, the view will pull out and begin slowly moving through the space by itself. The works focus on aligning the position and behaviour of the camera with the viewpoint of a virtual inhabitant, giving an embodied experience of the virtual space. Navigation is driven by touch-screen gestures; the experience of interacting with the work an enveloped, tactile experience “moulded by hapticity and peripheral unfocused vision”. Looking around the space is smooth and intuitive, setting up a direct tactile engagement between the work and the audience through dragging the view, like moving foliage aside on a path through the jungle.
