“public address” by Anne Walton

Title:

public address

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Performers:



• Anne Walton

Symposium:

• ISEA2002: 11th International Symposium on Electronic Art

Venue(s):

• Warehouses 4 & 20 on the Garden Pier in the port of Nagoya , Nagoya , Japan

Artist Statement:

public address is a live performance with video projection, framed by a large plate-glass window and presented in any city streetscape of the world over a period of 2-3 days and nights. By day, the artist appears as a figure moving back and forth across the window, engaged in the repetitive task of slowly covering and uncovering the window with sheets of A4 tracing paper. By night, engaged in the same task, the artist repeatedly crosses paths with the video projection of her earlier self. Both figures are engaged in uncovering and recovering the window and the streetscape which lies beyond it, but in different time frames. Passers-by glimpse the familiar streetscape and see themselves, possibly, in each other. Past and present overlap and reflect sameness and difference. The ‘normal’ position of the urban viewer/voyeur becomes blurred temporally and spatially.

public address takes the street-front window and draws attention to it as a bare membrane, confusing outside and inside, public and private, subject and object, now and then. Within the (non) space of a window, the city streetscape is passed through a thin filter of time, questioning what seems fixed and concrete, highlighting the ordinary and the everyday and opening up a fresh space for reverie and play within the highly regulated and scopic public domain.

public address will be touring to the US, Canada, the UK and Europe in early-mid 2003. The artist invites expressions of interest in hosting this work in any city on any continent of the world. The project is assisted by the Conference and Workshop Fund of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, a devolved grant program of the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s Arts Funding and Advisory Body.