Drawing on Feedback
Experimental research project in feedback between the Whitworth Art Gallery and digital culture
A programme being run by PhD student Julian Hartley as part of his research practice at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester
What is the project?
This project aims to explore processes for feedback, exchange and agreement between users of social media, digital communications or other creative technologies and the Whitworth Art Gallery.
The idea is to use the gallery's collection of drawings by British artist Stephen Willats as a conceptual model with which to re-think the use and value of the Whitworth's content: how its collections, data, spaces and expertise could be organised in relation to the way digital technologies are being used in people's everyday social lives.
What will the project do?
Stephen Willats' 'Orientation Drawing' Series (1968) is interpreted as a model for networked communications. In these drawings Willats represents the idea of an 'interactive interface' between people and their environment that acts as a homeostat, a self-organising system that maintains stability by balancing feedback from its various constituents.
When applied to the relationship between the gallery and society, a homeostat has the potential to produce a homeostasis, a state in which the differences between the participants are preserved. Their relationship is non-hierarchical and a mutually beneficial 'agreement' between them is achieved.
The project will experiment with the ideas that Willats explored through the making of these drawings by opening an exploratory space where the gallery's content and digital culture can interact.
Who is the project for?
The project invites the digital community to explore, along with the gallery, opportunities for greater complexity in the everyday interaction between Manchester's digital and art gallery cultures.
Why Willats?
Today's digital technologies can transform how publics interact with art collections, making their relationship increasingly relevant within the social fabric of communities. In the 1960s Willats became interested in "the potential of interactive networks that were non-hierarchical and built upon an open exchange of information between all nodes, i.e. decision-making elements, seeing the philosophical ramifications of these networks as shaping the future of society."
The drawings he made in this period have new-found relevance in today's digital culture. They share a common ground as a provider of models for social interaction based on networked systems that challenge old media's linear approach to communication. Inter-connectedness between users of social media has enabled people to self-organise their consumption and production of knowledge; this idea of self-organisation is used by Willats to re-define the traditionally understood relationship between artwork, exhibition space and viewer. So, the notion that the artist is the sole creator of a work exhibited in a gallery for the public's gaze is replaced with ideas of co-creation, networks and social interpretations.
Willats Links
http://stephenwillats.com/
http://www.controlmagazine.org/
For further information, visit Julian's blog 'Drawing on Feedback'