Project Stargate performance piece (Price, Claire) http://www.the-facility.co.uk

participants

Project Stargate references how, in an age of instant electronic media and satellite communication it is possible for us to experience in some form any place, activity or mechanism, anywhere in the world. Stargate explores how this ease of visual consumption effects our capacity for understanding the essence behind the image and whether this reduces us to a position of inert consumers rather than proactive participants in our visual world.

Project Stargate refers to the code name for a psychic defence project run by the American military in the 1970’s. Based upon experiments originally carried out at the Stanford Research Institute USA into the phenomenon of ‘remote viewing’ when the artist and psychic Ingo Swann suggested that he could travel psychically to anywhere in the world and describe in detail the visual form and context of these sites.

The experiment is an attempt to explore how this ease of visual consumption effects our capacity for understanding the essence behind the image and whether this reduces us to a position of inert consumers rather than proactive participants in our visual world. The show attempts to pick apart aspects of consumption through assumption, by frustrating the viewer through withholding and elongating the reveal process of a place or object. And through abstracting this communication or by expressing it’s essence in alternative terms, then a slower, deeper or just plain different, understanding may be achieved. This is an attempt to intimate the meaning of design, form and functionality without ever revealing it in it’s full visual form.

process: In a gallery space in London an individual will sit at a desk (they will be known as the Transmitter). At the start of each day they will be given the task of communicating some object or image to a remote individual sitting at a similar desk alone in a gallery space within the Bikinhaus building in Berlin (they will be known as the Receiver).

The exhibition will take place daily during gallery hours running for one full week. At the start of each day the Transmitter will be issued with either an object or image which they then have to describe as fully as they can to the Receiver. The Transmitter is aware that the Receiver is going to have to react and respond to their instructions and descriptions to attempt to emulate/create in some form the object that is being described. Each day will serve as a distinct and separate experiment from the previous day’s events.
The Transmitter is only allowed to communicate with the Receiver using e-mail.

abstract: Project Stargate references how, in an age of instant electronic media and satellite communication it is possible for us to experience in some form any place, activity or mechanism, anywhere in the world. Stargate explores how this ease of visual consumption effects our capacity for understanding the essence behind the image and whether this reduces us to a position of inert consumers rather than proactive participants in our visual world.

Through abstracting the methods of communication between 2 people located hundreds of miles apart, then a slower, deeper or just plain different, understanding of this process may be achieved. This is an attempt to intimate the meaning of design, form and functionality without ever revealing it in it's full visual form.

Biography

Claire Price is a director of the facility, a design practice that in all aspects of its practice – architecture, writing or curating - is dedicated to initiating new dialogues on art, architecture and the urban experience. Claire has curated exhibitions for Ikon Gallery Birmingham and the Architecture Foundation London. She has written extensively on art and architecture in the UK and teaches at Cheslea College of Art and the Bartlett School of Architecture London.