Larissa Kostoff at OCAD writes:
With slogans as compelling as With Glowing Hearts and Go World, it was hard not to get caught up in the excitement of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games — and that’s before you even factor in the athletes. Faculty of Art Assistant Professor Geoffrey Shea was in Vancouver, the city that had the eyes of the world on it last month, but he asked visitors to engage in a different kind of play via the 2010 Cultural Olympiad.
Shea’s interactive musical sound and video sculpture PLAY: The Hertzian Collective, ran from February 4 to February 21, 2010 in Vancouver. The sculpture, specially commissioned by organizers of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, invited viewers to “play it” with their mobile devices.
PLAY: The Hertzian Collective was featured as part of the Olympiad’s multi-venue CODE Live program, which showcased digital technology-based artworks that champion participation, exploration and research. CODE was the 2010 Cultural Olympiad’s “Digital Edition,” developed to creatively engage national and global audiences through the creative use of digital technology.
The focus of Shea’s piece was serendipitous. “It just so happened that a significant aspect of the work I was doing had to do with play,” Shea explains, acknowledging the artwork’s unintentional complement to the spirit of the Games.
Shea is a media artist, musician, and researcher. Play: The Hertzian Collective emerges out of recent work he created together with members of the Mobile Experience Lab, an art research and creation facility he co-leads at OCAD. Organizers of CODE knew of Shea through Portage, one of the lab’s previous mobile art projects, and sought him out as a potential contributor. Not surprising, given that much of Shea’s teaching and research is focused on mobile and locative cultural content delivery and on the creation of wireless platforms.
“As diverse as the CODE projects are, they’re fuelled by the same spirit. We’re using digital technology to enlarge the creative space in which artists and audiences can connect,” says Rae Hull, creative director of CODE. “It’s about closing the distance between art and the viewer, whether that’s by giving people more choice about when and how to engage, or actually having the audience participate in the creation of works, CODE is a vehicle to connect, create and collaborate.”
PLAY: The Hertzian Collective is a musical sound sculpture made with projected video images and controlled collectively by viewers with their mobile phones. Viewers receive instructions on how to “play” the sculpture by dialing a toll-free phone number, and by pressing buttons on their keypads, which enable them to take control of different parts of the action.
As important as technology is to a piece like this, Shea is quick to point out that it isn’t everything. “I try not to get too worked up about technology,” he says. “It’s just something we have at our disposal. In fact I think that the challenges involved in making art that touches people are much greater than any technological challenges we may face in the process of making it.”
Inviting and participatory, what the sculpture really encourages is connection. Visual and sound rhythms and sequences are created by the players, and exploration quickly gives way to jamming and collaboration as each person realizes they are sharing in the creation of an interactive artwork.
A phrase coined by Shea, The Hertzian Collective refers to the intersections made possible when the musical tones and radio frequencies, which are both measured in hertz, and which underpin the artwork, are controlled or played by the ad-hoc collective of individuals who happen to be standing in front of it at a given moment, mobile phones in hand.
Says Shea, “I think a lot of artists have a tiered expectation of how people will respond to their work. In this case, on the first level, the work is engaging; it’s attractive and enticing. Because it’s enticing, people see it. They get closer and they’re encouraged to dial in. Soon, they become aware of the fact that they’re controlling it; this becomes the second level of enjoyment. And then they start realizing they’re not just playing, they’re crafting music — putting something of themselves into the actual piece. That’s when they discover that someone else is controlling it too. Suddenly, they’re jamming. They’re collaborating.
“With interactive work, you have to strike a balance between giving over control to the viewer and not making the piece devoid of self-expression. I have something to say but I don’t want, necessarily, to impose it on the work. So what I’ve done is created musical and spoken word compositions that are something like the beats in a rhythm sequencer. People can turn them on and off, thereby creating their own rhythms and [when you factor in the spoken word] their own poems.”