[ISEA2004] Artists Statement: Karen Lancel, HERMEN MAAT, ANNE NIGTEN & ROBERT STEIJN – STALKSHOW

Artists Statement

WIRELESS EXPERIENCE

A wearable, wireless interactive billboard is being carried through public spaces. StalkShow deals with the threat of insecurity and isolation. It invites the audience to participate and give this threat a personal face and space; to expose both its horror and its beauty.

StalkShow takes place in public spaces such as railway stations, festivals, museums, squares, and airports. Karen Lance! carries an interactive billboard containing a laptop with a touch screen around these spaces. People are invited to touch the screen and to navigate through texts about the threat of insecurity and isolation.

StalkShowstexts originate from a collection of statements that Lancet has been collecting from the internet since 2000. The statements – “personal strategies for dealing with a social space” – have been written by people living in isolation, such as a prisoner, a nun, an asylum seeker, and a digi-persona.

By navigating through the StalkShow texts, the audience is invited to generate their own montage of social strategies. With the aid of a webcam and wireless internet connection, live video portraits of members of the audience appear together with the statements on a large projection screen in the same public space. Projected, ‘watching’ faces, view the (watching] audience,

Thanks to: Amsterdam Fund for the Art, Fund for Performance Art, [Nes]theaters Amsterdam, Foundation DasArts; and Mart van Bree, G. Heeg, Hermen Maat, Robert Steijn, Jason Wilson.

  • Karen Lancel (NL) uses a combination of online and offline media in which she invites the audience to participate. She designs projects for cities’ public spaces, inquiring into the changing perception of the public space and notions of community. In her
    installations she connects social experiences in the virtual and the physical space alike.
  • HERMEN MAATANNE NIGTENROBERT STEIJN, The Netherlands

lancelmaat.nl     agora-phobia-digitalis.org

Full document (PDF) p. 56