Getting Halo Into Places

What do you do with a rad interactive artwork

About a year before I started at Slant my friend Alex and I were awarded a grant for the production of an interactive artwork. Over the course of the year we designed and produced a reactive light sculpture we called Halo. And, like all great projects, we built it with the plan of shopping it around to different galleries, festivals and venues afterwards.

Along comes life. We completed the project on time, i.e. we submitted our documentation on time, even though we stalled from our original timeline by about 6 months. Afterwards, I got wrapped up into completing my work in Calgary before moving on to Vancouver. The move meant I was pretty much unavailable until the beginning of May, there was lots to wrap up at my other jobs, with the house and so on. Then, I had a crazy project at Slant that I had to do in 10 days which brought me to the middle of the month. Then I burned out and took a couple weeks off.

May 31

We submitted our final documentation in late Feb, and it would take until the end of May for me to have the mental capacity to start looking for places to submit Halo.

We started looking at various places in the city, galleries, venues, etc. to see where and who might be interested in the project. So, we started with one of the local galleries that works with interactive media.

So, I wrote up an email that looked like:

I am an artist working in collaboration on a new interactive light sculpture with my colleagues from Tangible Interaction Inc. We have created a new installation and are interested in submitting a proposal to your gallery.

I have read the documents you have posted online for your Gallery and Techlab proposals and feel like our project will fit in either one or the other. I would like to visit the [gallery] and look at the space, and if possible I would like to ask a few questions while I’m there concerning the proposal submission.

Would there be some time to drop by before June 7th?

My portfolio site is: www.postfl.com
My colleague’s site is: www.tangibleinteraction.com

Attached you will find a small image of the piece lit up. Here is a link to a short video of the sculpture being animated:

A short test of Halo, long before we exhibited it anywhere

I sent it and never heard back from them

We never heard from them, fine. Maybe the piece wasn’t to their liking, or maybe we were just getting the cold shoulder for no real reason. We had another connection to the same gallery, but that one didn’t work out either. It seemed strange to me at the time: why would a gallery flat out ignore a proposal, especially when there’s a page on their site for submitting proposals?!

At this point we weren’t too worried about it, we hadn’t actually come up with any content for the piece but were simply looking for a place to potentially submit so that we could focus on building content for that exhibition.

The plan was to keep looking for places. Even though the project wasn’t done through Slant, exposure for this project that I was heavily involved with meant exposure for Slant.