Territories of Practice
The end of last term culminated in the ‘Territories of Practice’ show, my group ‘Other Worlds’ consisted of Daniel Bandfield, Dan Rowan-Smith, Oli Lyon and myself.
The show received a largely positive reaction from our peers, however I was unfortunately unable to attend the event or see my work to its fullest completion due to illness. We had been given a week for the show (Setup began on Monday and the show opened on the Thursday) and after walking around London looking for fabric to divide the space, as well as finding some friends of Dan’s to try to 3D scan Daniel’s work to use in my model on the Monday, I had to leave halfway though the Tuesday as soon as I had managed to get to a point from where I could instruct someone else to complete it.
For me, it brought about a new way of working and introduced me seriously to the medium of video games as art. What I saw myself as doing was not making so much a statement about the use of video games and its paraphernalia as I was utilising a tool that would enable me to play around with a very large space that I could then have people directed to walk through, something that is not possible outside of the virtual world (at least not on my budget).
Beyond this initial use, it also allows me to build a world that conforms the specific ways in which I want people to approach and interact with my work. A video game world that has no directive or apparent narrative provides a perfect playground to impose ideas and constraints upon people. This medium has been used primarily for goal-driven interaction and so in their experience of it people are looking for a goal. There is no ‘win’ state however, people ‘wander, surprised but not shocked by a continuous repetition of the same’ (a phrase I borrow from Anthony Vidler’s essay on Post-urbanism).
Christmas onwards
We had an essay which I will post up immediately after this post. It was received rather well by the essay tutor John Douglas Millar, which may seem like a sort of boasting and I apologise for that. To me being told that I’ve done something well by a figure of authority is a validation that things I do and say come across occasionally in the way I want them to, that I am playing the right language games for my audience.
One day whilst working at uni, I was asked by Andrew Hart, a fellow student if I wanted to be in a show he was going to put on in the morgue. As I didn’t really have anything worth showing, he suggested I simply do my work in the space and DJ a bit. So I did that, and I’m on the poster and here are some pictures, but I wouldn’t exactly call my performance ‘Art’, and by art I mean the Joseph Kosuth tautology -this is art because I the artist say it is- or rather, for me sitting awkwardly angled down at a laptop barely making any progress and really needing to watch a tutorial but spending time messing around may be a common activity of my work-time, however it isn’t art because I say it isn’t.
Oh and I cut my hair too, so those long ropey curtains are being sent to the Little Princess Trust rather than greasing up my face.
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
Robin Leverton 
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