Simulation: Alter Dom, Linz, Oesterreich/Austria
Strategically placed within a high-vaulted and significant architectural space, a trampoline is an invitation to the singular pleasure of defying gravity with levity by jumping. Less a subversion of the original purpose of the architecture, than a light-hearted and unusual enhancement to a user's experience of the space. One by one, the audience may mount the apparatus to ascend to new perspectives within the architecture and its particular code of signification. Each participant's efforts are visually recorded as they rise, peak, and fall against the spectacular mise-en-scène of the interior.
The juxtaposition of a semantically-charged architectural space with the apparently thoughtless activity of jumping, is intended to cause reflection on behalf of the user and audience - fusing the concepts of humor and profundity to invoke in the participant the possibility for revelation and the production of personal significance. That momentary sensation of mid-air hover, after the ascent and before the fall, is here being paralleled to the concept of peripeteia or the 'pregnant moment', when past and future hang in the balance.
It is these small yet significant instants from each user-experience that the artists will extract as data, displaying and printing images on-site for local distribution, while instantaneously posting data to a website for a global audience. Images, still and moving, will gradually constitute an archive of weightless moments for the public to access as the exhibition unfolds. For the remote spectatorship online, as for the local passers-by exterior to the space, a 'hovering' animation of diverse humanity projected onto the exterior architecture is just one way of experiencing the data collected on site. After the performative aspects of the event finish the database and it's manipulated content will remain as an artwork in the public domain.
Levity, Gravity, Peripeteia simultaneously embraces: the specificity of architectural sites; the non-specificity of cyberspace; the technological extension of the local into the global; the individual character, mood and style of those who perform the artwork and the Duchampian notion that an audience - not the artist - completes the work of art. An acknowledgement of larger secondary & tertiary audiences and of extended public space or domain then arises for consideration.