A fair like no other...

--"What do you think of scientists now that you've been to the Fair?"
--"...um...they're mad and crazy."
--"Mad and crazy?! Is that right? What do you think of artists then? The artists here?"
--"...they're mad, too."
--"They're crazy, too...?!"
--"They're all mad and crazy."

Conversation I had with a 8-year-old boy at the Fair with his father.

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The Kinetica Art Fair was an interesting experience. I met my supervisor, Renee (a sweet girl from Puyallup, go figure, that has been living abroad for six years), and other volunteers for the Fair. After a short introductory, we proceeded to work for nearly 10 hours the first day, and 12 hours the next day setting up. Picture an old, factory basement littered with wood and nails with semi-erect walls and fresh paint, shouting cockney accents and ladders swinging around corners. Painting white walls black, painting black walls white, sweeping, carrying, organizing, sanding, delivering, gluing, sticking, relaying...only a couple of the many things that had to get done before we opened for the Collector's Launch.

I swear we weren't going to make it (especially considering that morning I had reorganized the Museum Shop six times before the director decided to scratch the space entirely), but come 6pm on Wednesday, the doors opened and in glided old British ladies in fur coats, men in suits, and other odd guests. I was given a clipboard with a pricelist that made my eyes bug and told to stand in my nice black dress to greet visitors. The aim of that night was to see whether people had any interest in buying the pieces. Conversations that were had that night were carefully worded; any serious likelihood that someone you were talking to was going to buy was passed off immediately to the Director. I, myself, entertained a nice lawyer from God-Knows-Where who probably more interested in my after-party plans than a robotic art reenactment of the Big Bang I was trying to show him (who wouldn't be interested in that?!), but I heard others had better luck...

The next day was Press Day, and then public hours. By then, I was so tired of standing on my feet all day and then rushing off to do more standing in museums and London sight-seeing spots that I was already feeling a bit jaded. But turns out, public hours meant that many of the artists would still be present to explain their work, and as a result, I got to meet some very interesting people such as Ivan Black (revolving, hanging sculptures), Ioannis Michalous (who actually post-doc'd at MIT Media Labs), Alex Posada (ingenious artist behind the Big Bang sculpture), Balint Bolygo (who built the crazy mirrored chandelier sculpture controlled by natural chemicals laws), Carlo Bernardini (fiber-optic sculptor), Tine Bech (fantastic woman with deep believes in play studies), Jerzy Kediora (balancing sculptures, many of them just recently featured in Dubai), the adorable guys from Poietic Studios, Christiaan Zwanikken (responsible for the reanimated dead animal sculptures), and the staff from the Manchester Art Gallery's "Make it Yourself" exhibit (fascinating, very passionate people). And of course, Dianne Harris, the director of the Kinetica Museum and kinetic sculptor herself.

I had recorded videos to try and upload here, but being that I haven't yet figured out how to deal with the file conversions (damn you blogspot!), here is the bit BBC did on the Fair this year--which I actually find a bit boring, but apparently drew in a lot of visitors.

I even got to do a bit of visitor interviewing while working at the Fair. A couple times, I went around with their camera crew to capture audio and video footage of visitors’ reactions to artwork. This, though, quickly became uncomfortable with the mounting pressure from the cameraman to just get people on camera and not do proper evaluations; I did not like having to throw a giant microphone in someone’s unsuspecting face while he zoomed in with a bright light and lens over my shoulder… But left alone, I managed to interview and write down the responses from a lot of people, which gave me a glimpse into what a full-scale investigation would look like in both the practicality of its execution and its usefulness for my dissertation as well as the museum.

What I learned, though, from the Kinetica Art Fair was fairly interesting. Overall, my impression was good: the positive benefits of throwing an event like this was definitely apparent. Everyone I talked to either said they were “stimulated” or “in awe” of what they saw, of the future, of artwork, etc. Many liked how the art fair was not necessarily limited to art-farts, but rather with the interdisciplinary nature of the pieces, became a forum for many different types of people to share and discuss topics around the works. So, all good.

At the same time, it also became clear that the field of new media has much growing left to do. Some of the pieces really incorporated technology for truly artistic aims, while others were more interactive design and highly commercial. On the real extreme, some pieces didn’t seem like art at all, but rather included elements of technology for the exotic purpose that it was “cutting-edge” or “avant-garde.” In these cases, you had artworks that were suspended in a weird matrix that wasn’t exactly art and it wasn’t exactly science either. Clearly, there exists subdivisions in this field that have yet to be clearly defined.

Additionally, I found communication within artistic circles just as convoluted and confusing as that in the science ones. Some artists really had a handle on the technological concepts behind the work; others barely explored the fields, but rather exploited scientific facts as ‘natural’ inspiration for their works. I think as much as there was an opportunity to make meaning out of science and technology with these cross-disciplinary art pieces, there was just enough risk to find the works unapproachable for just that—it was art, after all—and these circles have their own sets of high-end jargon and snobbery like those of quantum physics or cancer research. This, needless to say, was a bit discouraging.

But nevertheless, the whole experience was eye-opening and I’d certainly return next year to do it again. Hopefully, Director Dianne will be open to conducting a full-scale analysis of her visitors. I think it’d be terribly interesting to find out who comes to these events and why. But until then, I siphoned enough fair catalogues to keep me busy with artist bios until 2012. :-)