Cover Image Saraceno T, Movement (2021)
Explore Claire Bishop’s book about participatory art, and Grant Kester’s book about dialogical art in a global context. Write an evaluation and research an artist who uses participation as part of their drawing practice. Consider the work from your own perspective, and utilise what you’ve learned from prior reading.
Types of participatory art
Community art
Socially engaged art
Social practice
Performance
Engagement with environment
Participatory art has the opportunity to use it’s subjects to expand the process. The subjects can become the art, the location or physical journey taken is a resource. The dialogue between participants and the projects deepens and can create an intrinsic change.
These genres ebb and flow within historical moments. Things change and they take the meaning of participatory art with it. Race, technology, politics….situations being provocative and then inclusive.
They offer opportunity for ‘social amelioration’ (the act of making something better).
The manipulation of the planet for personal gain is troublesome. Tomas Saraceno’s 2021 Installation “Movement” signposts the importance of Interspecies cohabitation.
In balance manipulation of locations and its resources is effective, but tipped either way off scale it becomes destructive, or, withholds a very useful resource ie. developments in health care, education, awareness, etc. I believe the key to maintaining balance is empathy. If you can maintain a healthy state of empathy you can make better choices regarding your influence on the environment, and the population that inhabits it. Empathy burn out occurs when we are stressed, over stimulated, have low emotional intelligence. Certainly stress and over stimulation are global issues and catalysts into bad decision making.
Movement, by Tomas Saraceno
I have chosen Tomas Saraceno’s ‘Movement’ as my example because its concept instantly fascinated me. It is a perfect combination of an initial mystery, followed by a very simple but effective message, and then a modern form of public interaction with the piece. It has the ability to make the audience think about our conscious and unconscious influence on the planet.
“Movement’ is an aeroglyphic sculpture lifted only by the air and the sun. An effective participatory art project that takes a simple concept engaging the natural elements and human interaction as they are invited follow the path of the areoglyph on an app. It combines radical practices utilising natural components, and the modern day methods, communicating the exhibit as an app online.
It draws our attention to something assumed yet vulnerable. And certainly manifests a need to change our habits and reconsider the effects of our resources. Whether this type of work can effect change or is just taken as an interesting expression is yet to be revealed.
“To be aware of the air is to be sensitive to the environment, to be aware of an element that sustains life, transmits, and carries. Naturally, air evades the senses, occasionally felt as a breeze against the skin, and only rarely made visible as vapour or smog.
Yet, this visibility means the air no longer escapes empirical perception; its natural invisibility has been compromised as humans have increasingly industrialised. Oceans have become filled with debris, the Earth has been covered with concrete, energy is the source of political conflict, and the air absorbs pollutants from every source. This is what is found in the Anthropocene–the proposed geological epoch that commences when human action became the dominant force transforming the environment”.
List of Images
Cover Image Saraceno, T. (2021) Movement. [Photogragh] At:https://www.ruinart.com/en-us/tomassaraceno.html (Accessed 22.03.2025).
Bibliography
Saraceno, T. (2021) Movement. [Installation] At:https://studiotomassaraceno.org/movement/ (Accessed 22.03.2025).