Immersive Museum Experience: Process Week 1
During the first week of the project, I primarily worked on selecting my artist, and getting a general feeling for his work. When I visited CMOA, I was most captivated by the interactive pieces, whereby I could feel like I was a part of the artwork’s narrative and/ or could have a more immersive experience. For such reasons, I chose to focus on Alex Da Corte, specifically, his piece Rubber Pencil Devil. The installation is visually compelling on its own, but it was the 57 videos alluding to different cultural references that both puzzled me and piqued my curiousity.
I did some initial research to better understand Rubber Pencil Devil as well as Da Corte’s general body of work. My first point of reference was the Carnegie International’s museum guide.
Reading about the piece and making the connections between the videos shown in the house, and the references that they alluded to helped me better understand how the piece sought to challenge perceptions of known realities, and create an epiphany moment that carried on the experience of interacting with the art even after the viewers leave the exhibition.
I then went on to reading articles and interviews on the internet to get a better sense of Da Corte’s general body of work and the thematic patterns that emerge within his pieces. I found many links between my initial perceptions of my museum going experience and what it was that I researched. For example, whilst watching the videos, I found several of them to be rather confusing, but when I searched them up later, I was able to achieve a greater sense of clarity.
Another way in which I was able to better understand the general feeling of Da Corte’s work was through a mood board.
While I had done a lot of research with regards to the thematic qualities (intangible) of Da Corte’s pieces, creating a mood board allowed me to focus more on the visual component, as well at the mood and atmosphere elicited from his pieces. I drew inspiration from the various references alluded to in Rubber Pencil Devil, as well as some of Da Corte’s other exhibition spaces to get a better idea of how I might place his work in the context of space. The overall visual mood I got from Da Corte’s work was how it felt very oversaturated and saccharine, as well as eclectic and trance like.
